Daily Papers

We study the problem of learning a single neuron with respect to the L_2^2-loss in the presence of adversarial label noise. We give an efficient algorithm that, for a broad family of activations including ReLUs, approximates the optimal L_2^2-error within a constant factor. Our algorithm applies under much milder distributional assumptions compared to prior work. The key ingredient enabling our results is a novel connection to local error bounds from optimization theory.

End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2EAD) methods typically rely on supervised perception tasks to extract explicit scene information (e.g., objects, maps). This reliance necessitates expensive annotations and constrains deployment and data scalability in real-time applications. In this paper, we introduce SSR, a novel framework that utilizes only 16 navigation-guided tokens as Sparse Scene Representation, efficiently extracting crucial scene information for E2EAD. Our method eliminates the need for human-designed supervised sub-tasks, allowing computational resources to concentrate on essential elements directly related to navigation intent. We further introduce a temporal enhancement module, aligning predicted future scenes with actual future scenes through self-supervision. SSR achieves a 27.2\% relative reduction in L2 error and a 51.6\% decrease in collision rate to UniAD in nuScenes, with a 10.9times faster inference speed and 13times faster training time. Moreover, SSR outperforms VAD-Base with a 48.6-point improvement on driving score in CARLA's Town05 Long benchmark. This framework represents a significant leap in real-time autonomous driving systems and paves the way for future scalable deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/PeidongLi/SSR.

Pre-training neural operators on diverse partial differential equation (PDE) datasets has emerged as a promising direction for building general-purpose surrogate models in scientific machine learning. However, the inherent complexity and structural diversity of PDE solution operators make multi-PDE pre-training fundamentally challenging. Existing methods mainly address this by increasing model capacity, while leaving the target solution operators unchanged. Inspired by classical numerical analysis, we instead propose to transform complex and diverse solution operators into simpler, better-aligned forms that are easier to model jointly. Since the optimal transformation varies across PDE types, it must be adaptive and input-dependent, allowing a single neural operator to approximate an entire family of operators. We instantiate this idea as AOT-POT (adaptive operator-transformation for pre-training operator transformer), which expands hidden representations into multiple parallel streams, adaptively aggregates and redistributes them before and after each sub-layer, and mixes streams through Sinkhorn-projected doubly stochastic matrices for stable training. These mechanisms together reshape diverse solution operators into a unified form that can be effectively modeled by a single architecture. Empirically, AOT-POT achieves state-of-the-art performance on 12 PDE benchmarks with only 3\% additional parameters, reducing relative L2 error by up to 77.6\% (40.9\% on average). Fine-tuning AOT-POT further reduces L2 error by up to 92\% on in-domain PDEs and 89\% on out-of-domain PDEs (unseen types during pre-training), demonstrating that adaptive operator transformation is an effective and complementary direction for advancing PDE foundation models beyond simply scaling model capacity.

In autonomous driving, dynamic environment and corner cases pose significant challenges to the robustness of ego vehicle's decision-making. To address these challenges, commencing with the representation of state-action mapping in the end-to-end autonomous driving paradigm, we introduce a novel pipeline, VDT-Auto. Leveraging the advancement of the state understanding of Visual Language Model (VLM), incorporating with diffusion Transformer-based action generation, our VDT-Auto parses the environment geometrically and contextually for the conditioning of the diffusion process. Geometrically, we use a bird's-eye view (BEV) encoder to extract feature grids from the surrounding images. Contextually, the structured output of our fine-tuned VLM is processed into textual embeddings and noisy paths. During our diffusion process, the added noise for the forward process is sampled from the noisy path output of the fine-tuned VLM, while the extracted BEV feature grids and embedded texts condition the reverse process of our diffusion Transformers. Our VDT-Auto achieved 0.52m on average L2 errors and 21% on average collision rate in the nuScenes open-loop planning evaluation. Moreover, the real-world demonstration exhibited prominent generalizability of our VDT-Auto. The code and dataset will be released after acceptance.

We give an improved theoretical analysis of score-based generative modeling. Under a score estimate with small L^2 error (averaged across timesteps), we provide efficient convergence guarantees for any data distribution with second-order moment, by either employing early stopping or assuming smoothness condition on the score function of the data distribution. Our result does not rely on any log-concavity or functional inequality assumption and has a logarithmic dependence on the smoothness. In particular, we show that under only a finite second moment condition, approximating the following in reverse KL divergence in epsilon-accuracy can be done in tilde Oleft(d log (1/delta){epsilon}right) steps: 1) the variance-delta Gaussian perturbation of any data distribution; 2) data distributions with 1/delta-smooth score functions. Our analysis also provides a quantitative comparison between different discrete approximations and may guide the choice of discretization points in practice.

Neural operators learn mappings between function spaces, which is practical for learning solution operators of PDEs and other scientific modeling applications. Among them, the Fourier neural operator (FNO) is a popular architecture that performs global convolutions in the Fourier space. However, such global operations are often prone to over-smoothing and may fail to capture local details. In contrast, convolutional neural networks (CNN) can capture local features but are limited to training and inference at a single resolution. In this work, we present a principled approach to operator learning that can capture local features under two frameworks by learning differential operators and integral operators with locally supported kernels. Specifically, inspired by stencil methods, we prove that we obtain differential operators under an appropriate scaling of the kernel values of CNNs. To obtain local integral operators, we utilize suitable basis representations for the kernels based on discrete-continuous convolutions. Both these approaches preserve the properties of operator learning and, hence, the ability to predict at any resolution. Adding our layers to FNOs significantly improves their performance, reducing the relative L2-error by 34-72% in our experiments, which include a turbulent 2D Navier-Stokes and the spherical shallow water equations.

Modern autonomous driving systems are typically divided into three main tasks: perception, prediction, and planning. The planning task involves predicting the trajectory of the ego vehicle based on inputs from both internal intention and the external environment, and manipulating the vehicle accordingly. Most existing works evaluate their performance on the nuScenes dataset using the L2 error and collision rate between the predicted trajectories and the ground truth. In this paper, we reevaluate these existing evaluation metrics and explore whether they accurately measure the superiority of different methods. Specifically, we design an MLP-based method that takes raw sensor data (e.g., past trajectory, velocity, etc.) as input and directly outputs the future trajectory of the ego vehicle, without using any perception or prediction information such as camera images or LiDAR. Our simple method achieves similar end-to-end planning performance on the nuScenes dataset with other perception-based methods, reducing the average L2 error by about 20%. Meanwhile, the perception-based methods have an advantage in terms of collision rate. We further conduct in-depth analysis and provide new insights into the factors that are critical for the success of the planning task on nuScenes dataset. Our observation also indicates that we need to rethink the current open-loop evaluation scheme of end-to-end autonomous driving in nuScenes. Codes are available at https://github.com/E2E-AD/AD-MLP.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models show strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by leveraging world knowledge and understanding to excel in long-tail scenarios. However, current VLAs have two limitations: 1) Degeneration into vision-action (VA) models. For low latency, regression/flow-based methods directly generate actions but underuse VLM understanding, causing unsafe, unexplainable actions. 2) Autoregressive high latency. Autoregressive methods sequentially generate chain-of-thought (CoT) and action tokens, fully leveraging VLM understanding, but high latency hinders deployment. To enable low-latency deployment while using CoT to assist action generation, we propose AUGUstus, an Autonomous-driving VLA model with Unified Generation and Understanding. We unify diffusion-based action generation and autoregressive CoT understanding in one model, where understanding only serves generation. Joint CoT supervision preserves VLM spatial understanding in shared representation for safer, more accurate trajectories. AUGUstus-mode orders action generation before CoT, so CoT supervises reliable actions during training while inference needs only action output, enabling low latency. AUGUstus-GRPO, a unified GRPO algorithm, jointly optimizes action and CoT, improving action performance. Experiments show AUGUstus achieves 94.6 PDMS on NAVSIMv1 and 90.7 EPDMS on NAVSIMv2, SOTA planning without scorer module. On nuScenes, it achieves average L2 error 0.27 m and average collision rate 0.05%, best among compared methods. To validate AUGUstus practicality, we train on in-house data with 512 NVIDIA H800 GPUs for ~2 days, evaluate on an internal 1,000 km dataset, and preliminarily deploy on a real vehicle, achieving 12 Hz operation. Project page: https://augustus-ad.github.io

Data-driven approaches for autonomous driving (AD) have been widely adopted in the past decade but are confronted with dataset bias and uninterpretability. Inspired by the knowledge-driven nature of human driving, recent approaches explore the potential of large language models (LLMs) to improve understanding and decision-making in traffic scenarios. They find that the pretrain-finetune paradigm of LLMs on downstream data with the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning process can enhance explainability and scene understanding. However, such a popular strategy proves to suffer from the notorious problems of misalignment between the crafted CoTs against the consequent decision-making, which remains untouched by previous LLM-based AD methods. To address this problem, we motivate an end-to-end decision-making model based on multimodality-augmented LLM, which simultaneously executes CoT reasoning and carries out planning results. Furthermore, we propose a reasoning-decision alignment constraint between the paired CoTs and planning results, imposing the correspondence between reasoning and decision-making. Moreover, we redesign the CoTs to enable the model to comprehend complex scenarios and enhance decision-making performance. We dub our proposed large language planners with reasoning-decision alignment as RDA-Driver. Experimental evaluations on the nuScenes and DriveLM-nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our RDA-Driver in enhancing the performance of end-to-end AD systems. Specifically, our RDA-Driver achieves state-of-the-art planning performance on the nuScenes dataset with 0.80 L2 error and 0.32 collision rate, and also achieves leading results on challenging DriveLM-nuScenes benchmarks with 0.82 L2 error and 0.38 collision rate.

Vision Language Action (VLA) models promise an open-vocabulary interface that can translate perceptual ambiguity into semantically grounded driving decisions, yet they still treat language as a static prior fixed at inference time. As a result, the model must infer continuously shifting objectives from pixels alone, yielding delayed or overly conservative maneuvers. We argue that effective VLAs for autonomous driving need an online channel in which users can influence driving with specific intentions. To this end, we present EchoVLA, a user-aware VLA that couples camera streams with in situ audio instructions. We augment the nuScenes dataset with temporally aligned, intent-specific speech commands generated by converting ego-motion descriptions into synthetic audios. Further, we compose emotional speech-trajectory pairs into a multimodal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) for fine-tuning a Multimodal Large Model (MLM) based on Qwen2.5-Omni. Specifically, we synthesize the audio-augmented dataset with different emotion types paired with corresponding driving behaviors, leveraging the emotional cues embedded in tone, pitch, and speech tempo to reflect varying user states, such as urgent or hesitant intentions, thus enabling our EchoVLA to interpret not only the semantic content but also the emotional context of audio commands for more nuanced and emotionally adaptive driving behavior. In open-loop benchmarks, our approach reduces the average L2 error by 59.4% and the collision rate by 74.4% compared to the baseline of vision-only perception. More experiments on nuScenes dataset validate that EchoVLA not only steers the trajectory through audio instructions, but also modulates driving behavior in response to the emotions detected in the user's speech.

In an era marked by the rapid scaling of foundation models, autonomous driving technologies are approaching a transformative threshold where end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) emerges due to its potential of scaling up in the data-driven manner. However, existing E2E-AD methods are mostly evaluated under the open-loop log-replay manner with L2 errors and collision rate as metrics (e.g., in nuScenes), which could not fully reflect the driving performance of algorithms as recently acknowledged in the community. For those E2E-AD methods evaluated under the closed-loop protocol, they are tested in fixed routes (e.g., Town05Long and Longest6 in CARLA) with the driving score as metrics, which is known for high variance due to the unsmoothed metric function and large randomness in the long route. Besides, these methods usually collect their own data for training, which makes algorithm-level fair comparison infeasible. To fulfill the paramount need of comprehensive, realistic, and fair testing environments for Full Self-Driving (FSD), we present Bench2Drive, the first benchmark for evaluating E2E-AD systems' multiple abilities in a closed-loop manner. Bench2Drive's official training data consists of 2 million fully annotated frames, collected from 13638 short clips uniformly distributed under 44 interactive scenarios (cut-in, overtaking, detour, etc), 23 weathers (sunny, foggy, rainy, etc), and 12 towns (urban, village, university, etc) in CARLA v2. Its evaluation protocol requires E2E-AD models to pass 44 interactive scenarios under different locations and weathers which sums up to 220 routes and thus provides a comprehensive and disentangled assessment about their driving capability under different situations. We implement state-of-the-art E2E-AD models and evaluate them in Bench2Drive, providing insights regarding current status and future directions.

Autonomous driving is a complex and challenging task that aims at safe motion planning through scene understanding and reasoning. While vision-only autonomous driving methods have recently achieved notable performance, through enhanced scene understanding, several key issues, including lack of reasoning, low generalization performance and long-tail scenarios, still need to be addressed. In this paper, we present VLP, a novel Vision-Language-Planning framework that exploits language models to bridge the gap between linguistic understanding and autonomous driving. VLP enhances autonomous driving systems by strengthening both the source memory foundation and the self-driving car's contextual understanding. VLP achieves state-of-the-art end-to-end planning performance on the challenging NuScenes dataset by achieving 35.9\% and 60.5\% reduction in terms of average L2 error and collision rates, respectively, compared to the previous best method. Moreover, VLP shows improved performance in challenging long-tail scenarios and strong generalization capabilities when faced with new urban environments.

Although multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities across diverse domains, their application in generating fine-grained 3D perception and prediction outputs in autonomous driving remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose DrivePI, a novel spatial-aware 4D MLLM that serves as a unified Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework that is also compatible with vision-action (VA) models. Our method jointly performs spatial understanding, 3D perception (i.e., 3D occupancy), prediction (i.e., occupancy flow), and planning (i.e., action outputs) in parallel through end-to-end optimization. To obtain both precise geometric information and rich visual appearance, our approach integrates point clouds, multi-view images, and language instructions within a unified MLLM architecture. We further develop a data engine to generate text-occupancy and text-flow QA pairs for 4D spatial understanding. Remarkably, with only a 0.5B Qwen2.5 model as MLLM backbone, DrivePI as a single unified model matches or exceeds both existing VLA models and specialized VA models. Specifically, compared to VLA models, DrivePI outperforms OpenDriveVLA-7B by 2.5% mean accuracy on nuScenes-QA and reduces collision rate by 70% over ORION (from 0.37% to 0.11%) on nuScenes. Against specialized VA models, DrivePI surpasses FB-OCC by 10.3 RayIoU for 3D occupancy on OpenOcc, reduces the mAVE from 0.591 to 0.509 for occupancy flow on OpenOcc, and achieves 32% lower L2 error than VAD (from 0.72m to 0.49m) for planning on nuScenes. Code will be available at https://github.com/happinesslz/DrivePI

End-to-end autonomous driving via Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demands a precarious balance between high-fidelity trajectory planning and efficient inference. Existing paradigms typically fall short: autoregressive (AR) VLAs are memory-bandwidth-bound on edge hardware and prone to exposure-bias drift, while full-sequence diffusion models preclude KV-cache reuse and suffer from "logical leakage" that violates the fundamental perceive-then-plan causality. We present Fast-dDrive, a block-diffusion VLA that performs bidirectional refinement within semantic units while enforcing strict causal ordering across them. Leveraging the observation that driving VLAs often emit structured JSON-like outputs, Fast-dDrive freezes structural tokens into a section scaffold and employs a section-aware training recipe that prioritizes safety-critical planning. We further introduce Scaffold Speculative Decoding to achieve AR-equivalent quality at significantly higher throughput. Finally, we propose a low-overhead test-time scaling scheme: by forking N stochastic trajectory rollouts from a single shared-prefix KV cache and averaging them, we effectively suppress prediction variance at a fractional computational cost. Empirical results demonstrate that Fast-dDrive redefines the speed-accuracy frontier for driving agents. On the WOD-E2E test set, Fast-dDrive achieves SOTA ADE@3s and ADE@5s, alongside the highest RFS among diffusion-based VLAs; on nuScenes, it reduces average L2 error to 0.32m (a 22% improvement). When integrated with SGLang, our framework delivers 12times throughput speedup over the AR baseline, narrowing the gap between high-capacity VLAs and the efficiency demands of real-time on-vehicle deployment.

Accurate and rapid estimation of hemodynamic metrics, such as pressure and wall shear stress (WSS), is important for assessing the severity of Coronary Artery Disease (CAD). Existing approaches, including invasive Fractional Flow Reserve (FFR) measurements and computationally expensive Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations, face challenges in invasiveness, cost, and speed. We present a framework for fast, non-invasive coronary hemodynamics prediction. The model encodes 1D vessel centerlines together with inlet flow rate using a transformer-based encoder, and predicts continuous wall-based fields via an anisotropic Radial Basis Function (RBF) decoder aligned with vessel morphology. To support training and evaluation, we introduce two datasets with paired steady-state OpenFOAM simulations: (i) a synthetic benchmark of 4,200 single-vessel geometries with controlled anatomical variations, and (ii) a multi-vessel dataset derived from ImageCAS including 4,800 cases spanning both right and left coronary arteries, generated by randomly introducing stenoses and varying physiologically plausible flow rates. Across both datasets, our method achieves lower pressure and WSS errors than strong neural-operator baselines (GNOT, Transolver, and ONO) at a fraction of the computational cost of CFD. On the multi-vessel dataset, using 1,024 anisotropic RBF centers our model reduces the mean relative L2 error by 52% compared to the best neural-operator baseline, while at 128 centers it requires 13.8x fewer FLOPs than GNOT and still outperforms all baselines. The single-vessel dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/angioinsight/single-vessel-flow.

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged recently as a promising application of deep neural networks to the numerical solution of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). However, it has been recognized that adaptive procedures are needed to force the neural network to fit accurately the stubborn spots in the solution of "stiff" PDEs. In this paper, we propose a fundamentally new way to train PINNs adaptively, where the adaptation weights are fully trainable and applied to each training point individually, so the neural network learns autonomously which regions of the solution are difficult and is forced to focus on them. The self-adaptation weights specify a soft multiplicative soft attention mask, which is reminiscent of similar mechanisms used in computer vision. The basic idea behind these SA-PINNs is to make the weights increase as the corresponding losses increase, which is accomplished by training the network to simultaneously minimize the losses and maximize the weights. In addition, we show how to build a continuous map of self-adaptive weights using Gaussian Process regression, which allows the use of stochastic gradient descent in problems where conventional gradient descent is not enough to produce accurate solutions. Finally, we derive the Neural Tangent Kernel matrix for SA-PINNs and use it to obtain a heuristic understanding of the effect of the self-adaptive weights on the dynamics of training in the limiting case of infinitely-wide PINNs, which suggests that SA-PINNs work by producing a smooth equalization of the eigenvalues of the NTK matrix corresponding to the different loss terms. In numerical experiments with several linear and nonlinear benchmark problems, the SA-PINN outperformed other state-of-the-art PINN algorithm in L2 error, while using a smaller number of training epochs.

Precise grounding matters. It specifies which object is the target and where that object is, even in clutter and for tiny objects, and it has to be fast enough for closed-loop control. Yet vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAMs) take perception from general-purpose vision-language and video-generation backbones, which still fail in these settings. We introduce GroundingPI, a 4B grounding foundation model that generates points and boxes as quantized coordinates in a shared vocabulary. Training combines multimodal and spatial pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning with GRPO, using supervision from public datasets and dedicated data engines. Against 44 baselines across 34 grounding benchmarks spanning 11 perceptual capabilities, GroundingPI establishes a new state of the art, averaging 73.68%, above the larger GPT-6 Astra (71.54%). As a downstream visual backbone, GroundingPI improves performance on robotic manipulation and autonomous driving. On RoboTwin 2.0, it outperforms every mainstream backbone we evaluate in all four out-of-distribution settings, by up to 24.8% relative to the strongest backbone. On RoboCasa-GR1, GroundingPI trained with 50% of the demonstrations outperforms those baselines trained with 75%. On nuScenes, used as the visual backbone, GroundingPI attains an average open-loop L2 error of 0.296 m. We systematically analyze GroundingPI's pretraining in scale and data composition. Downstream autonomous driving and robotic manipulation improve as the pretraining is scaled. Analyzing the data recipe across these 11 perceptual capabilities shows dense grounding's substantial benefits for both, and OCR's potential as a catalyst for perceptual learning. These results support grounding as a perceptual foundation, and dedicated perceptual pretraining as a promising direction for foundation models of physical intelligence.

Recent success in deep learning has partially been driven by training increasingly overparametrized networks on ever larger datasets. It is therefore natural to ask: how much of the data is superfluous, which examples are important for generalization, and how do we find them? In this work, we make the striking observation that, in standard vision datasets, simple scores averaged over several weight initializations can be used to identify important examples very early in training. We propose two such scores -- the Gradient Normed (GraNd) and the Error L2-Norm (EL2N) scores -- and demonstrate their efficacy on a range of architectures and datasets by pruning significant fractions of training data without sacrificing test accuracy. In fact, using EL2N scores calculated a few epochs into training, we can prune half of the CIFAR10 training set while slightly improving test accuracy. Furthermore, for a given dataset, EL2N scores from one architecture or hyperparameter configuration generalize to other configurations. Compared to recent work that prunes data by discarding examples that are rarely forgotten over the course of training, our scores use only local information early in training. We also use our scores to detect noisy examples and study training dynamics through the lens of important examples -- we investigate how the data distribution shapes the loss surface and identify subspaces of the model's data representation that are relatively stable over training.

End-to-end (E2E) driving has become a cornerstone of both industry deployment and academic research, offering a single learnable pipeline that maps multi-sensor inputs to actions while avoiding hand-engineered modules. However, the reliability of such pipelines strongly depends on how well they handle uncertainty: sensors are noisy, semantics can be ambiguous, and interaction with other road users is inherently stochastic. Uncertainty also appears in multiple forms: classification vs. localization, and, crucially, in both static map elements and dynamic agents. Existing E2E approaches model only static-map uncertainty, leaving planning vulnerable to overconfident and unreliable inputs. We present UniUncer, the first lightweight, unified uncertainty framework that jointly estimates and uses uncertainty for both static and dynamic scene elements inside an E2E planner. Concretely: (1) we convert deterministic heads to probabilistic Laplace regressors that output per-vertex location and scale for vectorized static and dynamic entities; (2) we introduce an uncertainty-fusion module that encodes these parameters and injects them into object/map queries to form uncertainty-aware queries; and (3) we design an uncertainty-aware gate that adaptively modulates reliance on historical inputs (ego status or temporal perception queries) based on current uncertainty levels. The design adds minimal overhead and drops throughput by only sim0.5 FPS while remaining plug-and-play for common E2E backbones. On nuScenes (open-loop), UniUncer reduces average L2 trajectory error by 7\%. On NavsimV2 (pseudo closed-loop), it improves overall EPDMS by 10.8\% and notable stage two gains in challenging, interaction-heavy scenes. Ablations confirm that dynamic-agent uncertainty and the uncertainty-aware gate are both necessary.

Large volumes of text data have contributed significantly to the development of large language models (LLMs) in recent years. This data is typically acquired by scraping the internet, leading to pretraining datasets comprised of noisy web text. To date, efforts to prune these datasets down to a higher quality subset have relied on hand-crafted heuristics encoded as rule-based filters. In this work, we take a wider view and explore scalable estimates of data quality that can be used to systematically measure the quality of pretraining data. We perform a rigorous comparison at scale of the simple data quality estimator of perplexity, as well as more sophisticated and computationally intensive estimates of the Error L2-Norm and memorization. These metrics are used to rank and prune pretraining corpora, and we subsequently compare LLMs trained on these pruned datasets. Surprisingly, we find that the simple technique of perplexity outperforms our more computationally expensive scoring methods. We improve over our no-pruning baseline while training on as little as 30% of the original training dataset. Our work sets the foundation for unexplored strategies in automatically curating high quality corpora and suggests the majority of pretraining data can be removed while retaining performance.

Fast, geometry-generalizing surrogates for unsteady flow remain challenging. We present a time-dependent, geometry-aware Deep Operator Network that predicts velocity fields for moderate-Re flows around parametric and non-parametric shapes. The model encodes geometry via a signed distance field (SDF) trunk and flow history via a CNN branch, trained on 841 high-fidelity simulations. On held-out shapes, it attains sim 5% relative L2 single-step error and up to 1000X speedups over CFD. We provide physics-centric rollout diagnostics, including phase error at probes and divergence norms, to quantify long-horizon fidelity. These reveal accurate near-term transients but error accumulation in fine-scale wakes, most pronounced for sharp-cornered geometries. We analyze failure modes and outline practical mitigations. Code, splits, and scripts are openly released at: https://github.com/baskargroup/TimeDependent-DeepONet to support reproducibility and benchmarking.

Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is a critical task in Natural Language Processing, addressing the growing demand for automated writing assistance in both second-language (L2) and native (L1) Chinese writing. While L2 learners struggle with mastering complex grammatical structures, L1 users also benefit from CGEC in academic, professional, and formal contexts where writing precision is essential. This survey provides a comprehensive review of CGEC research, covering datasets, annotation schemes, evaluation methodologies, and system advancements. We examine widely used CGEC datasets, highlighting their characteristics, limitations, and the need for improved standardization. We also analyze error annotation frameworks, discussing challenges such as word segmentation ambiguity and the classification of Chinese-specific error types. Furthermore, we review evaluation metrics, focusing on their adaptation from English GEC to Chinese, including character-level scoring and the use of multiple references. In terms of system development, we trace the evolution from rule-based and statistical approaches to neural architectures, including Transformer-based models and the integration of large pre-trained language models. By consolidating existing research and identifying key challenges, this survey provides insights into the current state of CGEC and outlines future directions, including refining annotation standards to address segmentation challenges, and leveraging multilingual approaches to enhance CGEC.

We propose a weakly-supervised model for word-level mispronunciation detection in non-native (L2) English speech. To train this model, phonetically transcribed L2 speech is not required and we only need to mark mispronounced words. The lack of phonetic transcriptions for L2 speech means that the model has to learn only from a weak signal of word-level mispronunciations. Because of that and due to the limited amount of mispronounced L2 speech, the model is more likely to overfit. To limit this risk, we train it in a multi-task setup. In the first task, we estimate the probabilities of word-level mispronunciation. For the second task, we use a phoneme recognizer trained on phonetically transcribed L1 speech that is easily accessible and can be automatically annotated. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, we improve the accuracy of detecting word-level pronunciation errors in AUC metric by 30% on the GUT Isle Corpus of L2 Polish speakers, and by 21.5% on the Isle Corpus of L2 German and Italian speakers.

While deep learning-based methods for blind face restoration have achieved unprecedented success, they still suffer from two major limitations. First, most of them deteriorate when facing complex degradations out of their training data. Second, these methods require multiple constraints, e.g., fidelity, perceptual, and adversarial losses, which require laborious hyper-parameter tuning to stabilize and balance their influences. In this work, we propose a novel method named DifFace that is capable of coping with unseen and complex degradations more gracefully without complicated loss designs. The key of our method is to establish a posterior distribution from the observed low-quality (LQ) image to its high-quality (HQ) counterpart. In particular, we design a transition distribution from the LQ image to the intermediate state of a pre-trained diffusion model and then gradually transmit from this intermediate state to the HQ target by recursively applying a pre-trained diffusion model. The transition distribution only relies on a restoration backbone that is trained with L_2 loss on some synthetic data, which favorably avoids the cumbersome training process in existing methods. Moreover, the transition distribution can contract the error of the restoration backbone and thus makes our method more robust to unknown degradations. Comprehensive experiments show that DifFace is superior to current state-of-the-art methods, especially in cases with severe degradations. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/zsyOAOA/DifFace.

The performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems has constantly increased in state-of-the-art development. However, performance tends to decrease considerably in more challenging conditions (e.g., background noise, multiple speaker social conversations) and with more atypical speakers (e.g., children, non-native speakers or people with speech disorders), which signifies that general improvements do not necessarily transfer to applications that rely on ASR, e.g., educational software for younger students or language learners. In this study, we focus on the gap in performance between recognition results for native and non-native, read and spontaneous, Swedish utterances transcribed by different ASR services. We compare the recognition results using Word Error Rate and analyze the linguistic factors that may generate the observed transcription errors.

Posterior sampling has been shown to be a powerful Bayesian approach for solving imaging inverse problems. The recent plug-and-play unadjusted Langevin algorithm (PnP-ULA) has emerged as a promising method for Monte Carlo sampling and minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimation by combining physical measurement models with deep-learning priors specified using image denoisers. However, the intricate relationship between the sampling distribution of PnP-ULA and the mismatched data-fidelity and denoiser has not been theoretically analyzed. We address this gap by proposing a posterior-L2 pseudometric and using it to quantify an explicit error bound for PnP-ULA under mismatched posterior distribution. We numerically validate our theory on several inverse problems such as sampling from Gaussian mixture models and image deblurring. Our results suggest that the sensitivity of the sampling distribution of PnP-ULA to a mismatch in the measurement model and the denoiser can be precisely characterized.

The disparity in phonology between learner's native (L1) and target (L2) language poses a significant challenge for mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) systems. This challenge is further intensified by lack of annotated L2 data. This paper proposes a novel MDD architecture that exploits multiple `views' of the same input data assisted by auxiliary tasks to learn more distinctive phonetic representation in a low-resource setting. Using the mono- and multilingual encoders, the model learn multiple views of the input, and capture the sound properties across diverse languages and accents. These encoded representations are further enriched by learning articulatory features in a multi-task setup. Our reported results using the L2-ARCTIC data outperformed the SOTA models, with a phoneme error rate reduction of 11.13% and 8.60% and absolute F1 score increase of 5.89%, and 2.49% compared to the single-view mono- and multilingual systems, with a limited L2 dataset.

A large number of people are forced to use the Web in a language they have low literacy in due to technology asymmetries. Written text in the second language (L2) from such users often contains a large number of errors that are influenced by their native language (L1). We propose a method to mine phoneme confusions (sounds in L2 that an L1 speaker is likely to conflate) for pairs of L1 and L2. These confusions are then plugged into a generative model (Bi-Phone) for synthetically producing corrupted L2 text. Through human evaluations, we show that Bi-Phone generates plausible corruptions that differ across L1s and also have widespread coverage on the Web. We also corrupt the popular language understanding benchmark SuperGLUE with our technique (FunGLUE for Phonetically Noised GLUE) and show that SoTA language understating models perform poorly. We also introduce a new phoneme prediction pre-training task which helps byte models to recover performance close to SuperGLUE. Finally, we also release the FunGLUE benchmark to promote further research in phonetically robust language models. To the best of our knowledge, FunGLUE is the first benchmark to introduce L1-L2 interactions in text.

The automatic identification and analysis of pronunciation errors, known as Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis (MDD) plays a crucial role in Computer Aided Pronunciation Learning (CAPL) tools such as Second-Language (L2) learning or speech therapy applications. Existing MDD methods relying on analysing phonemes can only detect categorical errors of phonemes that have an adequate amount of training data to be modelled. With the unpredictable nature of the pronunciation errors of non-native or disordered speakers and the scarcity of training datasets, it is unfeasible to model all types of mispronunciations. Moreover, phoneme-level MDD approaches have a limited ability to provide detailed diagnostic information about the error made. In this paper, we propose a low-level MDD approach based on the detection of speech attribute features. Speech attribute features break down phoneme production into elementary components that are directly related to the articulatory system leading to more formative feedback to the learner. We further propose a multi-label variant of the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) approach to jointly model the non-mutually exclusive speech attributes using a single model. The pre-trained wav2vec2 model was employed as a core model for the speech attribute detector. The proposed method was applied to L2 speech corpora collected from English learners from different native languages. The proposed speech attribute MDD method was further compared to the traditional phoneme-level MDD and achieved a significantly lower False Acceptance Rate (FAR), False Rejection Rate (FRR), and Diagnostic Error Rate (DER) over all speech attributes compared to the phoneme-level equivalent.

Online mapping and end-to-end (E2E) planning in autonomous driving remain largely sensor-centric, leaving rich map priors, including HD/SD vector maps, rasterized SD maps, and satellite imagery, underused because of heterogeneity, pose drift, and inconsistent availability at test time. We present UMPE, a Unified Map Prior Encoder that can ingest any subset of four priors and fuse them with BEV features for both mapping and planning. UMPE has two branches. The vector encoder pre-aligns HD/SD polylines with a frame-wise SE(2) correction, encodes points via multi-frequency sinusoidal features, and produces polyline tokens with confidence scores. BEV queries then apply cross-attention with confidence bias, followed by normalized channel-wise gating to avoid length imbalance and softly down-weight uncertain sources. The raster encoder shares a ResNet-18 backbone conditioned by FiLM with scaling and shift at every stage, performs SE(2) micro-alignment, and injects priors through zero-initialized residual fusion, so the network starts from a do-no-harm baseline and learns to add only useful prior evidence. A vector-then-raster fusion order reflects the inductive bias of geometry first, appearance second. On nuScenes mapping, UMPE lifts MapTRv2 from 61.5 to 67.4 mAP (+5.9) and MapQR from 66.4 to 71.7 mAP (+5.3). On Argoverse2, UMPE adds +4.1 mAP over strong baselines. UMPE is compositional: when trained with all priors, it outperforms single-prior models even when only one prior is available at test time, demonstrating powerset robustness. For E2E planning with the VAD backbone on nuScenes, UMPE reduces trajectory error from 0.72 to 0.42 m L2 on average (-0.30 m) and collision rate from 0.22% to 0.12% (-0.10%), surpassing recent prior-injection methods. These results show that a unified, alignment-aware treatment of heterogeneous map priors yields better mapping and better planning.

Large pre-trained language models have brought remarkable progress in NLP. Pre-training and Fine-tuning have given state-of-art performance across tasks in text processing. Data Augmentation techniques have also helped build state-of-art models on low or zero resource tasks. Many works in the past have attempted at learning a single massively-multilingual machine translation model for zero-shot translation. Although those translation models are producing correct translations, the main challenge is those models are producing the wrong languages for zero-shot translation. This work and its results indicate that prompt conditioned large models do not suffer from off-target language errors i.e. errors arising due to translation to wrong languages. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of self-supervised pre-training and data augmentation for zero-shot multi-lingual machine translation.

Large Language Models (LLM) benchmarks tell us when models fail, but not why they fail. A wrong answer on a reasoning dataset may stem from formatting issues, calculation errors, or dataset noise rather than weak reasoning. Without disentangling such causes, benchmarks remain incomplete and cannot reliably guide model improvement. We introduce ErrorMap, the first method to chart the sources of LLM failure. It extracts a model's unique "failure signature", clarifies what benchmarks measure, and broadens error identification to reduce blind spots. This helps developers debug models, aligns benchmark goals with outcomes, and supports informed model selection. ErrorMap works on any model or dataset with the same logic. Applying our method to 35 datasets and 83 models we generate ErrorAtlas, a taxonomy of model errors, revealing recurring failure patterns. ErrorAtlas highlights error types that are currently underexplored in LLM research, such as omissions of required details in the output and question misinterpretation. By shifting focus from where models succeed to why they fail, ErrorMap and ErrorAtlas enable advanced evaluation - one that exposes hidden weaknesses and directs progress. Unlike success, typically measured by task-level metrics, our approach introduces a deeper evaluation layer that can be applied globally across models and tasks, offering richer insights into model behavior and limitations. We make the taxonomy and code publicly available with plans to periodically update ErrorAtlas as new benchmarks and models emerge.

Large language models (LLMs) possess impressive linguistic capabilities but often fail to faithfully retain factual knowledge, leading to hallucinations and unreliable outputs. Understanding LLMs' knowledge deficiencies by exhaustively evaluating against full-scale knowledge bases is computationally prohibitive, especially for closed-weight models. We propose stochastic error ascent (SEA), a scalable and efficient framework for discovering knowledge deficiencies (errors) in closed-weight LLMs under a strict query budget. Rather than naively probing all knowledge candidates, SEA formulates error discovery as a stochastic optimization process: it iteratively retrieves new high-error candidates by leveraging the semantic similarity to previously observed failures. To further enhance search efficiency and coverage, SEA employs hierarchical retrieval across document and paragraph levels, and constructs a relation directed acyclic graph to model error propagation and identify systematic failure modes. Empirically, SEA uncovers 40.7x more knowledge errors than Automated Capability Discovery and 26.7% more than AutoBencher, while reducing the cost-per-error by 599x and 9x, respectively. Human evaluation confirms the high quality of generated questions, while ablation and convergence analyses validate the contribution of each component in SEA. Further analysis on the discovered errors reveals correlated failure patterns across LLM families and recurring deficits, highlighting the need for better data coverage and targeted fine-tuning in future LLM development.

With Large Language Models (LLMs) being widely used across various tasks, detecting errors in their responses is increasingly crucial. However, little research has been conducted on error detection of LLM responses. Collecting error annotations on LLM responses is challenging due to the subjective nature of many NLP tasks, and thus previous research focuses on tasks of little practical value (e.g., word sorting) or limited error types (e.g., faithfulness in summarization). This work introduces ReaLMistake, the first error detection benchmark consisting of objective, realistic, and diverse errors made by LLMs. ReaLMistake contains three challenging and meaningful tasks that introduce objectively assessable errors in four categories (reasoning correctness, instruction-following, context-faithfulness, and parameterized knowledge), eliciting naturally observed and diverse errors in responses of GPT-4 and Llama 2 70B annotated by experts. We use ReaLMistake to evaluate error detectors based on 12 LLMs. Our findings show: 1) Top LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude 3 detect errors made by LLMs at very low recall, and all LLM-based error detectors perform much worse than humans. 2) Explanations by LLM-based error detectors lack reliability. 3) LLMs-based error detection is sensitive to small changes in prompts but remains challenging to improve. 4) Popular approaches to improving LLMs, including self-consistency and majority vote, do not improve the error detection performance. Our benchmark and code are provided at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/ReaLMistake.

The impressive performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) has consistently surpassed numerous human-designed benchmarks, presenting new challenges in assessing the shortcomings of LLMs. Designing tasks and finding LLMs' limitations are becoming increasingly important. In this paper, we investigate the question of whether an LLM can discover its own limitations from the errors it makes. To this end, we propose a Self-Challenge evaluation framework with human-in-the-loop. Starting from seed instances that GPT-4 fails to answer, we prompt GPT-4 to summarize error patterns that can be used to generate new instances and incorporate human feedback on them to refine these patterns for generating more challenging data, iteratively. We end up with 8 diverse patterns, such as text manipulation and questions with assumptions. We then build a benchmark, SC-G4, consisting of 1,835 instances generated by GPT-4 using these patterns, with human-annotated gold responses. The SC-G4 serves as a challenging benchmark that allows for a detailed assessment of LLMs' abilities. Our results show that only 44.96\% of instances in SC-G4 can be answered correctly by GPT-4. Interestingly, our pilot study indicates that these error patterns also challenge other LLMs, such as Claude-3 and Llama-3, and cannot be fully resolved through fine-tuning. Our work takes the first step to demonstrate that LLMs can autonomously identify their inherent flaws and provide insights for future dynamic and automatic evaluation.

The evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a key element in their continuous improvement process and many benchmarks have been developed to assess the performance of LLMs in different tasks and topics. As LLMs become adopted worldwide, evaluating them in languages other than English is increasingly important. However, most LLM benchmarks are simply translated using an automated tool and then run in the target language. This means that the results depend not only on the LLM performance in that language but also on the quality of the translation. In this paper, we consider the case of the well-known Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. Selected categories of the benchmark are translated into Spanish using Azure Translator and ChatGPT4 and run on ChatGPT4. Next, the results are processed to identify the test items that produce different answers in Spanish and English. Those are then analyzed manually to understand if the automatic translation caused the change. The results show that a significant fraction of the failing items can be attributed to mistakes in the translation of the benchmark. These results make a strong case for improving benchmarks in languages other than English by at least revising the translations of the items and preferably by adapting the tests to the target language by experts.

This study constructed a Japanese chat dataset for tuning large language models (LLMs), which consist of about 8.4 million records. Recently, LLMs have been developed and gaining popularity. However, high-performing LLMs are usually mainly for English. There are two ways to support languages other than English by those LLMs: constructing LLMs from scratch or tuning existing models. However, in both ways, datasets are necessary parts. In this study, we focused on supporting Japanese in those LLMs and making a dataset for training or tuning LLMs in Japanese. The dataset we constructed consisted of various tasks, such as translation and knowledge tasks. In our experiment, we tuned an existing LLM using our dataset and evaluated the performance qualitatively. The results suggest that our dataset is possibly beneficial for LLMs. However, we also revealed some difficulties in constructing LLMs in languages other than English.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved almost human-like performance on various tasks. While some LLMs have been trained on multilingual data, most of the training data is in English. Hence, their performance in English greatly exceeds their performance in other languages. This document presents our approach to training and evaluating the first foundational and chat LLM specialized for Romanian.

Many errors in student essays can be explained by influence from the native language (L1). L1 interference refers to errors influenced by a speaker's first language, such as using stadion instead of stadium, reflecting lexical transliteration from Russian. In this work, we address the task of detecting such errors in English essays written by Russian-speaking learners. We introduce RILEC, a large-scale dataset of over 18,000 sentences, combining expert-annotated data from REALEC with synthetic examples generated through rule-based and neural augmentation. We propose a framework for generating L1-motivated errors using generative language models optimized with PPO, prompt-based control, and rule-based patterns. Models fine-tuned on RILEC achieve strong performance, particularly on word-level interference types such as transliteration and tense semantics. We find that the proposed augmentation pipeline leads to a significant performance improvement, making it a potentially valuable tool for learners and teachers to more effectively identify and address such errors.

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming social science research by enabling the automation of labor-intensive tasks like data annotation and text analysis. However, LLM outputs vary significantly depending on the implementation choices made by researchers (e.g., model selection, prompting strategy, or temperature settings). Such variation can introduce systematic biases and random errors, which propagate to downstream analyses and cause Type I, Type II, Type S, or Type M errors. We call this LLM hacking. We quantify the risk of LLM hacking by replicating 37 data annotation tasks from 21 published social science research studies with 18 different models. Analyzing 13 million LLM labels, we test 2,361 realistic hypotheses to measure how plausible researcher choices affect statistical conclusions. We find incorrect conclusions based on LLM-annotated data in approximately one in three hypotheses for state-of-the-art models, and in half the hypotheses for small language models. While our findings show that higher task performance and better general model capabilities reduce LLM hacking risk, even highly accurate models do not completely eliminate it. The risk of LLM hacking decreases as effect sizes increase, indicating the need for more rigorous verification of findings near significance thresholds. Our extensive analysis of LLM hacking mitigation techniques emphasizes the importance of human annotations in reducing false positive findings and improving model selection. Surprisingly, common regression estimator correction techniques are largely ineffective in reducing LLM hacking risk, as they heavily trade off Type I vs. Type II errors. Beyond accidental errors, we find that intentional LLM hacking is unacceptably simple. With few LLMs and just a handful of prompt paraphrases, anything can be presented as statistically significant.

Recently, there has been a rapid advancement in research on Large Language Models (LLMs), resulting in significant progress in several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Consequently, there has been a surge in LLM evaluation research to comprehend the models' capabilities and limitations. However, much of this research has been confined to the English language, leaving LLM building and evaluation for non-English languages relatively unexplored. There has been an introduction of several new LLMs, necessitating their evaluation on non-English languages. This study aims to expand our MEGA benchmarking suite by including six new datasets to form the MEGAVERSE benchmark. The benchmark comprises 22 datasets covering 81 languages, including low-resource African languages. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT4, PaLM2, and Llama2 on the MEGAVERSE datasets. Additionally, we include two multimodal datasets in the benchmark and assess the performance of the LLaVa-v1.5 model. Our experiments suggest that GPT4 and PaLM2 outperform the Llama models on various tasks, notably on low-resource languages, with GPT4 outperforming PaLM2 on more datasets than vice versa. However, issues such as data contamination must be addressed to obtain an accurate assessment of LLM performance on non-English languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet their cross-lingual performance consistency remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces a novel methodology for efficiently identifying inherent cross-lingual weaknesses in LLMs. Our approach leverages beam search and LLM-based simulation to generate bilingual question pairs that expose performance discrepancies between English and target languages. We construct a new dataset of over 6,000 bilingual pairs across 16 languages using this methodology, demonstrating its effectiveness in revealing weaknesses even in state-of-the-art models. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our method precisely and cost-effectively pinpoints cross-lingual weaknesses, consistently revealing over 50\% accuracy drops in target languages across a wide range of models. Moreover, further experiments investigate the relationship between linguistic similarity and cross-lingual weaknesses, revealing that linguistically related languages share similar performance patterns and benefit from targeted post-training. Code is available at https://github.com/xzx34/Cross-Lingual-Pitfalls.

This paper describes a linguistically-motivated approach to the 2024 edition of the BabyLM Challenge (Warstadt et al. 2023). Rather than pursuing a first language learning (L1) paradigm, we approach the challenge from a second language (L2) learning perspective. In L2 learning, there is a stronger focus on learning explicit linguistic information, such as grammatical notions, definitions of words or different ways of expressing a meaning. This makes L2 learning potentially more efficient and concise. We approximate this using data from Wiktionary, grammar examples either generated by an LLM or sourced from grammar books, and paraphrase data. We find that explicit information about word meaning (in our case, Wiktionary) does not boost model performance, while grammatical information can give a small improvement. The most impactful data ingredient is sentence paraphrases, with our two best models being trained on 1) a mix of paraphrase data and data from the BabyLM pretraining dataset, and 2) exclusively paraphrase data.

There is increasing evidence that question-answering (QA) systems with Large Language Models (LLMs), which employ a knowledge graph/semantic representation of an enterprise SQL database (i.e. Text-to-SPARQL), achieve higher accuracy compared to systems that answer questions directly on SQL databases (i.e. Text-to-SQL). Our previous benchmark research showed that by using a knowledge graph, the accuracy improved from 16% to 54%. The question remains: how can we further improve the accuracy and reduce the error rate? Building on the observations of our previous research where the inaccurate LLM-generated SPARQL queries followed incorrect paths, we present an approach that consists of 1) Ontology-based Query Check (OBQC): detects errors by leveraging the ontology of the knowledge graph to check if the LLM-generated SPARQL query matches the semantic of ontology and 2) LLM Repair: use the error explanations with an LLM to repair the SPARQL query. Using the chat with the data benchmark, our primary finding is that our approach increases the overall accuracy to 72% including an additional 8% of "I don't know" unknown results. Thus, the overall error rate is 20%. These results provide further evidence that investing knowledge graphs, namely the ontology, provides higher accuracy for LLM powered question answering systems.

Given the rapid ascent of large language models (LLMs), we study the question: (How) can large language models help in reviewing of scientific papers or proposals? We first conduct some pilot studies where we find that (i) GPT-4 outperforms other LLMs (Bard, Vicuna, Koala, Alpaca, LLaMa, Dolly, OpenAssistant, StableLM), and (ii) prompting with a specific question (e.g., to identify errors) outperforms prompting to simply write a review. With these insights, we study the use of LLMs (specifically, GPT-4) for three tasks: 1. Identifying errors: We construct 13 short computer science papers each with a deliberately inserted error, and ask the LLM to check for the correctness of these papers. We observe that the LLM finds errors in 7 of them, spanning both mathematical and conceptual errors. 2. Verifying checklists: We task the LLM to verify 16 closed-ended checklist questions in the respective sections of 15 NeurIPS 2022 papers. We find that across 119 {checklist question, paper} pairs, the LLM had an 86.6% accuracy. 3. Choosing the "better" paper: We generate 10 pairs of abstracts, deliberately designing each pair in such a way that one abstract was clearly superior than the other. The LLM, however, struggled to discern these relatively straightforward distinctions accurately, committing errors in its evaluations for 6 out of the 10 pairs. Based on these experiments, we think that LLMs have a promising use as reviewing assistants for specific reviewing tasks, but not (yet) for complete evaluations of papers or proposals.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional reasoning capabilities, enabling them to solve various complex problems. Recently, this ability has been applied to the paradigm of tool learning. Tool learning involves providing examples of tool usage and their corresponding functions, allowing LLMs to formulate plans and demonstrate the process of invoking and executing each tool. LLMs can address tasks that they cannot complete independently, thereby enhancing their potential across different tasks. However, this approach faces two key challenges. First, redundant error correction leads to unstable planning and long execution time. Additionally, designing a correct plan among multiple tools is also a challenge in tool learning. To address these issues, we propose Tool-Planner, a task-processing framework based on toolkits. Tool-Planner groups tools based on the API functions with the same function into a toolkit and allows LLMs to implement planning across the various toolkits. When a tool error occurs, the language model can reselect and adjust tools based on the toolkit. Experiments show that our approach demonstrates a high pass and win rate across different datasets and optimizes the planning scheme for tool learning in models such as GPT-4 and Claude 3, showcasing the potential of our method.

The NLP community has mainly focused on scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) vertically, i.e., making them better for about 100 languages. We instead scale LLMs horizontally: we create, through continued pretraining, Glot500-m, an LLM that covers 511 languages, almost all of them low-resource. An important part of this effort is to collect and clean Glot500-c, a corpus that covers these 511 languages and allows us to train Glot500-m. We evaluate Glot500-m on five diverse tasks across these languages. We observe large improvements for both high-resource and lowresource languages compared to an XLM-R baseline. Our analysis shows that no single factor explains the quality of multilingual LLM representations. Rather, a combination of factors determines quality including corpus size, script, "help" from related languages and the total capacity of the model. Our work addresses an important goal of NLP research: we should not limit NLP to a small fraction of the world's languages and instead strive to support as many languages as possible to bring the benefits of NLP technology to all languages and cultures. Code, data and models are available at https://github.com/cisnlp/Glot500.

Despite the widespread availability of LLMs, there remains a substantial gap in their capabilities and availability across diverse languages. One approach to address these issues has been to take an existing pre-trained LLM and continue to train it on new languages. While prior works have experimented with language adaptation, many questions around best practices and methodology have not been covered. In this paper, we present a comprehensive investigation into the adaptation of LLMs to new languages. Our study covers the key components in this process, including vocabulary extension, direct preference optimization and the data scarcity problem for human alignment in low-resource languages. We scale these experiments across 9 languages and 2 parameter scales (7B and 70B). We compare our models against Llama 2, Aya-101, XGLM, BLOOM and existing language experts, outperforming all prior published baselines. Additionally, all evaluation code and checkpoints are made public to facilitate future research.

Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities across a variety of tasks. Despite the models only seeing text in training, several recent studies suggest that LLM representations implicitly capture aspects of the underlying grounded concepts. Here, we explore LLM representations of a particularly salient kind of grounded knowledge -- spatial relationships. We design natural-language navigation tasks and evaluate the ability of LLMs, in particular GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, and Llama2 series models, to represent and reason about spatial structures. These tasks reveal substantial variability in LLM performance across different spatial structures, including square, hexagonal, and triangular grids, rings, and trees. In extensive error analysis, we find that LLMs' mistakes reflect both spatial and non-spatial factors. These findings suggest that LLMs appear to capture certain aspects of spatial structure implicitly, but room for improvement remains.

Large language models (LLMs) are known to have the potential to generate harmful content, posing risks to users. While significant progress has been made in developing taxonomies for LLM risks and safety evaluation prompts, most studies have focused on monolingual contexts, primarily in English. However, language- and region-specific risks in bilingual contexts are often overlooked, and core findings can diverge from those in monolingual settings. In this paper, we introduce Qorgau, a novel dataset specifically designed for safety evaluation in Kazakh and Russian, reflecting the unique bilingual context in Kazakhstan, where both Kazakh (a low-resource language) and Russian (a high-resource language) are spoken. Experiments with both multilingual and language-specific LLMs reveal notable differences in safety performance, emphasizing the need for tailored, region-specific datasets to ensure the responsible and safe deployment of LLMs in countries like Kazakhstan. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

Recent works have shown the benefits to LLMs from fine-tuning golden-standard Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales or using them as correct examples in few-shot prompting. While humans can indeed imitate correct examples, learning from our mistakes is another vital aspect of human cognition. Hence, a question naturally arises: can LLMs learn and benefit from their mistakes, especially for their reasoning? This study investigates this problem from both the prompting and model-tuning perspectives. We begin by introducing CoTErrorSet, a new benchmark with 609,432 questions, each designed with both correct and error references, and demonstrating the types and reasons for making such mistakes. To explore the effectiveness of those mistakes, we design two methods: (1) Self-rethinking prompting guides LLMs to rethink whether they have made similar previous mistakes; and (2) Mistake tuning involves finetuning models in both correct and incorrect reasoning domains, rather than only tuning models to learn ground truth in traditional methodology. We conduct a series of experiments to prove LLMs can obtain benefits from mistakes in both directions. Our two methods offer potentially cost-effective strategies by leveraging errors to enhance reasoning capabilities, which costs significantly less than creating meticulously hand-crafted golden references. We ultimately make a thorough analysis of the reasons behind LLMs' errors, which provides directions that future research needs to overcome. CoTErrorSet will be published soon on \url{https://github.com/YookiTong/Learn-from-Mistakes-CotErrorSet}.

Today's classical planners are powerful, but modeling input tasks in formats such as PDDL is tedious and error-prone. In contrast, planning with Large Language Models (LLMs) allows for almost any input text, but offers no guarantees on plan quality or even soundness. In an attempt to merge the best of these two approaches, some work has begun to use LLMs to automate parts of the PDDL creation process. However, these methods still require various degrees of expert input. We present NL2Plan, the first domain-agnostic offline LLM-driven planning system. NL2Plan uses an LLM to incrementally extract the necessary information from a short text prompt before creating a complete PDDL description of both the domain and the problem, which is finally solved by a classical planner. We evaluate NL2Plan on four planning domains and find that it solves 10 out of 15 tasks - a clear improvement over a plain chain-of-thought reasoning LLM approach, which only solves 2 tasks. Moreover, in two out of the five failure cases, instead of returning an invalid plan, NL2Plan reports that it failed to solve the task. In addition to using NL2Plan in end-to-end mode, users can inspect and correct all of its intermediate results, such as the PDDL representation, increasing explainability and making it an assistive tool for PDDL creation.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to utilize external tools has enabled them to tackle an increasingly diverse range of tasks. However, as the tasks become more complex and long-horizon, the intricate tool utilization process may trigger various unexpected errors. Therefore, how to effectively handle such errors, including identifying, diagnosing, and recovering from them, has emerged as a key research direction for advancing tool learning. In this work, we first extensively analyze the types of errors encountered during the function-calling process on several competitive tool evaluation benchmarks. Based on it, we introduce CRITICTOOL, a comprehensive critique evaluation benchmark specialized for tool learning. Building upon a novel evolutionary strategy for dataset construction, CRITICTOOL holds diverse tool-use errors with varying complexities, which better reflects real-world scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments on CRITICTOOL, and validate the generalization and effectiveness of our constructed benchmark strategy. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the tool reflection ability on various LLMs, offering a new perspective on the field of tool learning in LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/Shellorley0513/CriticTool{https://github.com/Shellorley0513/CriticTool}.

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has not only provided numerous opportunities but also presented significant challenges. This becomes particularly evident when LLMs inadvertently generate harmful or toxic content, either unintentionally or because of intentional inducement. Existing alignment methods usually direct LLMs toward the favorable outcomes by utilizing human-annotated, flawless instruction-response pairs. Conversely, this study proposes a novel alignment technique based on mistake analysis, which deliberately exposes LLMs to erroneous content to learn the reasons for mistakes and how to avoid them. In this case, mistakes are repurposed into valuable data for alignment, effectively helping to avoid the production of erroneous responses. Without external models or human annotations, our method leverages a model's intrinsic ability to discern undesirable mistakes and improves the safety of its generated responses. Experimental results reveal that our method outperforms existing alignment approaches in enhancing model safety while maintaining the overall utility.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains. Math Word Problems (MWPs) serve as a crucial benchmark for evaluating LLMs' reasoning abilities. While most research primarily focuses on improving accuracy, it often neglects understanding and addressing the underlying patterns of errors. Current error classification methods rely on static and predefined categories, which limit their ability to capture the full spectrum of error patterns in mathematical reasoning. To enable systematic error analysis, we collect error samples from 15 different LLMs of varying sizes across four distinct MWP datasets using multiple sampling strategies. Based on this extensive collection, we introduce MWPES-300K, a comprehensive dataset containing 304,865 error samples that cover diverse error patterns and reasoning paths. To reduce human bias and enable fine-grained analysis of error patterns, we propose a novel framework for automated dynamic error classification in mathematical reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that dataset characteristics significantly shape error patterns, which evolve from basic to complex manifestations as model capabilities increase. With deeper insights into error patterns, we propose error-aware prompting that incorporates common error patterns as explicit guidance, leading to significant improvements in mathematical reasoning performance.

Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) require massive amounts of text data, and the performance of the LLMs typically correlates with the scale and quality of the datasets. This means that it may be challenging to build LLMs for smaller languages such as Nordic ones, where the availability of text corpora is limited. In order to facilitate the development of the LLMS in the Nordic languages, we curate a high-quality dataset consisting of 1.2TB of text, in all of the major North Germanic languages (Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish), as well as some high-quality English data. This paper details our considerations and processes for collecting, cleaning, and filtering the dataset.

LLM-as-a-Judge and reward models are widely used alternatives of multiple-choice questions or human annotators for large language model (LLM) evaluation. Their efficacy shines in evaluating long-form responses, serving a critical role as evaluators of leaderboards and as proxies to align LLMs via reinforcement learning. However, despite their popularity, their effectiveness outside of English remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis on automated evaluators, reporting key findings on their behavior in a non-English environment. First, we discover that English evaluation capabilities significantly influence language-specific capabilities, often more than the language proficiency itself, enabling evaluators trained in English to easily transfer their skills to other languages. Second, we identify critical shortcomings, where LLMs fail to detect and penalize errors, such as factual inaccuracies, cultural misrepresentations, and the presence of unwanted language. Finally, we release Kudge, the first non-English meta-evaluation dataset containing 5,012 human annotations in Korean.

Language models (LMs) are pre-trained on raw text datasets to generate text sequences token-by-token. While this approach facilitates the learning of world knowledge and reasoning, it does not explicitly optimize for linguistic competence. To bridge this gap, we propose L2T, a pre-training framework integrating Language Learning Tasks alongside standard next-token prediction. Inspired by human language acquisition, L2T transforms raw text into structured input-output pairs to provide explicit linguistic stimulation. Pre-training LMs on a mixture of raw text and L2T data not only improves overall performance on linguistic competence benchmarks but accelerates its acquisition, while maintaining competitive performance on general reasoning tasks.

Maybe not. We identify and analyse errors in the popular Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. Even though MMLU is widely adopted, our analysis demonstrates numerous ground truth errors that obscure the true capabilities of LLMs. For example, we find that 57% of the analysed questions in the Virology subset contain errors. To address this issue, we introduce a comprehensive framework for identifying dataset errors using a novel error taxonomy. Then, we create MMLU-Redux, which is a subset of 3,000 manually re-annotated questions across 30 MMLU subjects. Using MMLU-Redux, we demonstrate significant discrepancies with the model performance metrics that were originally reported. Our results strongly advocate for revising MMLU's error-ridden questions to enhance its future utility and reliability as a benchmark. Therefore, we open up MMLU-Redux for additional annotation https://huggingface.co/datasets/edinburgh-dawg/mmlu-redux.

As current training data for Large Language Models (LLMs) are dominated by English corpus, they are English-centric and they present impressive performance on English reasoning tasks.This paper primarily studies English-centric models, but our method could be universal by using the centric language in the dictionary for non-English-centric LLMs. Yet, they usually suffer from lower performance in other languages. There are about 7,000 languages over the world, and many are low-resourced on English-centric LLMs. For the sake of people who primarily speak these languages, it is especially urgent to enable our LLMs in those languages. Model training is usually effective, but computationally expensive and requires experienced NLP practitioners. This paper presents a novel and simple yet effective method called Dictionary Insertion Prompting (DIP). When providing a non-English prompt, DIP looks up a word dictionary and inserts words' English counterparts into the prompt for LLMs. It then enables better translation into English and better English model thinking steps which leads to obviously better results. We experiment with about 200 languages from FLORES-200. Since there are no adequate datasets, we use the NLLB translator to create synthetic multilingual benchmarks from the existing 4 English reasoning benchmarks such as GSM8K and AQuA. Despite the simplicity and computationally lightweight, we surprisingly found the effectiveness of DIP on math and commonsense reasoning tasks on multiple open-source and close-source LLMs.Our dictionaries, code, and synthetic benchmarks will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.

High-quality, error-free datasets are a key ingredient in building reliable, accurate, and unbiased machine learning (ML) models. However, real world datasets often suffer from errors due to sensor malfunctions, data entry mistakes, or improper data integration across multiple sources that can severely degrade model performance. Detecting and correcting these issues typically require tailor-made solutions and demand extensive domain expertise. Consequently, automation is challenging, rendering the process labor-intensive and tedious. In this study, we investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can help alleviate the burden of manual data cleaning. We set up an experiment in which an LLM, paired with Python, is tasked with cleaning the training dataset to improve the performance of a learning algorithm without having the ability to modify the training pipeline or perform any feature engineering. We run this experiment on multiple Kaggle datasets that have been intentionally corrupted with errors. Our results show that LLMs can identify and correct erroneous entries, such as illogical values or outlier, by leveraging contextual information from other features within the same row, as well as feedback from previous iterations. However, they struggle to detect more complex errors that require understanding data distribution across multiple rows, such as trends and biases.

Instruction tuning is critical for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, and recent studies have demonstrated that small amounts of human-curated data can outperform larger datasets, challenging traditional data scaling laws. While LLM-based data quality rating systems offer a cost-effective alternative to human annotation, they often suffer from inaccuracies and biases, even in powerful models like GPT-4. In this work, we introduce DS2, a Diversity-aware Score curation method for Data Selection. By systematically modeling error patterns through a score transition matrix, DS2 corrects LLM-based scores and promotes diversity in the selected data samples. Our approach shows that a curated subset (just 3.3% of the original dataset) outperforms full-scale datasets (300k samples) across various machine-alignment benchmarks, and matches or surpasses human-aligned datasets such as LIMA with the same sample size (1k samples). These findings challenge conventional data scaling assumptions, highlighting that redundant, low-quality samples can degrade performance and reaffirming that "more can be less."

We are 600 million Spanish speakers. We launched the #Somos600M Project because the diversity of the languages from LATAM, the Caribbean and Spain needs to be represented in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Despite being the 7.5% of the world population, there is no open dataset to instruction-tune large language models (LLMs), nor a leaderboard to evaluate and compare them. In this paper, we present how we have created as an international open-source community the first versions of the instruction and evaluation datasets, indispensable resources for the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in our languages.

Grammatical Error Detection (GED) methods rely heavily on human annotated error corpora. However, these annotations are unavailable in many low-resource languages. In this paper, we investigate GED in this context. Leveraging the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer capabilities of multilingual pre-trained language models, we train a model using data from a diverse set of languages to generate synthetic errors in other languages. These synthetic error corpora are then used to train a GED model. Specifically we propose a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline where the GED model is first fine-tuned on multilingual synthetic data from target languages followed by fine-tuning on human-annotated GED corpora from source languages. This approach outperforms current state-of-the-art annotation-free GED methods. We also analyse the errors produced by our method and other strong baselines, finding that our approach produces errors that are more diverse and more similar to human errors.

There have been a couple of studies showing that attempting to erase multilingual knowledge using only English data is insufficient for multilingual LLMs. However, their analyses remain highly performance-oriented. In this paper, we switch the point of view to evaluation, and address an additional blind spot which reveals itself when the multilingual LLM is fully finetuned with parallel multilingual dataset before unlearning. Here, language confusion occurs whereby a model responds in language different from that of the input prompt. Language confusion is a problematic phenomenon in unlearning, causing the standard reference-based metrics to fail. We tackle this phenomenon in three steps: (1) introduce N-gram-based Language-Mix (N-Mix) score to quantitatively show the language confusion is pervasive and consistent in multilingual LLMs, (2) demonstrate that reference-based metrics result in false negatives when N-Mix score is high, and(3) suggest the need of new type of unlearning evaluation that can directly assess the content of the generated sentences. We call this type of metrics as semantic-based metric.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their widespread application in automated code generation. However, these models can still generate defective code that deviates from the specification. Previous research has mainly focused on the mistakes in LLM-generated standalone functions, overlooking real-world software development situations where the successful generation of the code requires software contexts such as external dependencies. In this paper, we considered both of these code generation situations and identified a range of non-syntactic mistakes arising from LLMs' misunderstandings of coding question specifications. Seven categories of non-syntactic mistakes were identified through extensive manual analyses, four of which were missed by previous works. To better understand these mistakes, we proposed six reasons behind these mistakes from various perspectives. Moreover, we explored the effectiveness of LLMs in detecting mistakes and their reasons. Our evaluation demonstrated that GPT-4 with the ReAct prompting technique can achieve an F1 score of up to 0.65 when identifying reasons for LLM's mistakes, such as misleading function signatures. We believe that these findings offer valuable insights into enhancing the quality of LLM-generated code.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capability in solving mathematical problems. However, existing approaches primarily focus on improving the quality of correct training data, e.g., distilling high-quality correct solutions from advanced models, neglecting the value contained in error data, potentially hindering the model's reflective ability. Though some studies attempt to leverage error data, they often involve complex mechanisms, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore error nodes. In this work, we propose to enhance LLMs' reasoning ability by Learning from Errors for Mathematical Advancement (LEMMA). LEMMA constructs data consisting of an incorrect solution with an erroneous step and a reflection connection to a correct solution for fine-tuning. Specifically, we systematically analyze the model-generated error types and introduce an error-type grounded mistake augmentation method to collect diverse and representative errors. Correct solutions are either from fixing the errors or generating a fresh start. Through a model-aware smooth reflection connection, the erroneous solution is transferred to the correct one. By fine-tuning on the constructed dataset, the model is able to self-correct errors autonomously within the generation process without relying on external critique models. Experimental results demonstrate that LEMMA achieves significant performance improvements over other strong baselines.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at solving problems with clear and complete statements, but often struggle with nuanced environments or interactive tasks which are common in most real-world scenarios. This highlights the critical need for developing LLMs that can effectively engage in logically consistent multi-turn dialogue, seek information and reason with incomplete data. To this end, we introduce a novel benchmark comprising a suite of multi-turn tasks each designed to test specific reasoning, interactive dialogue, and information-seeking abilities. These tasks have deterministic scoring mechanisms, thus eliminating the need for human intervention. Evaluating frontier models on our benchmark reveals significant headroom. Our analysis shows that most errors emerge from poor instruction following, reasoning failures, and poor planning. This benchmark provides valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of current LLMs in handling complex, interactive scenarios and offers a robust platform for future research aimed at improving these critical capabilities.

With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years, new opportunities are emerging, but also new challenges, and contamination is quickly becoming critical. Business applications and fundraising in AI have reached a scale at which a few percentage points gained on popular question-answering benchmarks could translate into dozens of millions of dollars, placing high pressure on model integrity. At the same time, it is becoming harder and harder to keep track of the data that LLMs have seen; if not impossible with closed-source models like GPT-4 and Claude-3 not divulging any information on the training set. As a result, contamination becomes a critical issue: LLMs' performance may not be reliable anymore, as the high performance may be at least partly due to their previous exposure to the data. This limitation jeopardizes the entire progress in the field of NLP, yet, there remains a lack of methods on how to efficiently address contamination, or a clear consensus on prevention, mitigation and classification of contamination. In this paper, we survey all recent work on contamination with LLMs, and help the community track contamination levels of LLMs by releasing an open-source Python library named LLMSanitize implementing major contamination detection algorithms, which link is: https://github.com/ntunlp/LLMSanitize.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. Nonetheless, it was also witnessed that LLMs tend to produce inaccurate responses to specific queries. This deficiency can be traced to the tokenization step LLMs must undergo, which is an inevitable limitation inherent to all LLMs. In fact, incorrect tokenization is the critical point that hinders LLMs in understanding the input precisely, thus leading to unsatisfactory output. To demonstrate this flaw of LLMs, we construct an adversarial dataset, named as ADT (Adversarial Dataset for Tokenizer), which draws upon the vocabularies of various open-source LLMs to challenge LLMs' tokenization. ADT consists of two subsets: the manually constructed ADT-Human and the automatically generated ADT-Auto. Our empirical results reveal that our ADT is highly effective on challenging the tokenization of leading LLMs, including GPT-4o, Llama-3, Qwen2.5-max and so on, thus degrading these LLMs' capabilities. Moreover, our method of automatic data generation has been proven efficient and robust, which can be applied to any open-source LLMs. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to investigating LLMs' vulnerability in terms of challenging their token segmentation, which will shed light on the subsequent research of improving LLMs' capabilities through optimizing their tokenization process and algorithms.

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly important for machine learning applications. However, it can be challenging to align LLMs with our intent, particularly when we want to generate content that is preferable over others or when we want the LLM to respond in a certain style or tone that is hard to describe. To address this challenge, we propose an approach that uses contrastive examples to better describe our intent. This involves providing positive examples that illustrate the true intent, along with negative examples that show what characteristics we want LLMs to avoid. The negative examples can be retrieved from labeled data, written by a human, or generated by the LLM itself. Before generating an answer, we ask the model to analyze the examples to teach itself what to avoid. This reasoning step provides the model with the appropriate articulation of the user's need and guides it towards generting a better answer. We tested our approach on both synthesized and real-world datasets, including StackExchange and Reddit, and found that it significantly improves performance compared to standard few-shot prompting

To use Large Language Models (LLMs) in a targeted way for NLP problems in RE, we require both (1) basic knowledge about the inner workings of LLMs and (2) a guideline on how to select and systematically utilize or repurpose LLMs for NLP4RE tasks. This chapter establishes the required knowledge and introduces the fundamentals of LLMs in the first part. In the second part, we present a detailed guideline for students, researchers, and practitioners on using LLMs for their purposes.

Popular benchmarks (e.g., XNLI) used to evaluate cross-lingual language understanding consist of parallel versions of English evaluation sets in multiple target languages created with the help of professional translators. When creating such parallel data, it is critical to ensure high-quality translations for all target languages for an accurate characterization of cross-lingual transfer. In this work, we find that translation inconsistencies do exist and interestingly they disproportionally impact low-resource languages in XNLI. To identify such inconsistencies, we propose measuring the gap in performance between zero-shot evaluations on the human-translated and machine-translated target text across multiple target languages; relatively large gaps are indicative of translation errors. We also corroborate that translation errors exist for two target languages, namely Hindi and Urdu, by doing a manual reannotation of human-translated test instances in these two languages and finding poor agreement with the original English labels these instances were supposed to inherit.

We present a method for classifying syntactic errors in learner language, namely errors whose correction alters the morphosyntactic structure of a sentence. The methodology builds on the established Universal Dependencies syntactic representation scheme, and provides complementary information to other error-classification systems. Unlike existing error classification methods, our method is applicable across languages, which we showcase by producing a detailed picture of syntactic errors in learner English and learner Russian. We further demonstrate the utility of the methodology for analyzing the outputs of leading Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) systems.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the linguistic diversity of LLM safety research, highlighting the English-centric nature of the field. Through a systematic review of nearly 300 publications from 2020--2024 across major NLP conferences and workshops at *ACL, we identify a significant and growing language gap in LLM safety research, with even high-resource non-English languages receiving minimal attention. We further observe that non-English languages are rarely studied as a standalone language and that English safety research exhibits poor language documentation practice. To motivate future research into multilingual safety, we make several recommendations based on our survey, and we then pose three concrete future directions on safety evaluation, training data generation, and crosslingual safety generalization. Based on our survey and proposed directions, the field can develop more robust, inclusive AI safety practices for diverse global populations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various tasks, including instruction following, which is crucial for aligning model outputs with user expectations. However, evaluating LLMs' ability to follow instructions remains challenging due to the complexity and subjectivity of human language. Current benchmarks primarily focus on single-turn, monolingual instructions, which do not adequately reflect the complexities of real-world applications that require handling multi-turn and multilingual interactions. To address this gap, we introduce Multi-IF, a new benchmark designed to assess LLMs' proficiency in following multi-turn and multilingual instructions. Multi-IF, which utilizes a hybrid framework combining LLM and human annotators, expands upon the IFEval by incorporating multi-turn sequences and translating the English prompts into another 7 languages, resulting in a dataset of 4,501 multilingual conversations, where each has three turns. Our evaluation of 14 state-of-the-art LLMs on Multi-IF reveals that it presents a significantly more challenging task than existing benchmarks. All the models tested showed a higher rate of failure in executing instructions correctly with each additional turn. For example, o1-preview drops from 0.877 at the first turn to 0.707 at the third turn in terms of average accuracy over all languages. Moreover, languages with non-Latin scripts (Hindi, Russian, and Chinese) generally exhibit higher error rates, suggesting potential limitations in the models' multilingual capabilities. We release Multi-IF prompts and the evaluation code base to encourage further research in this critical area.

Learning to optimize (L2O) is an emerging approach that leverages machine learning to develop optimization methods, aiming at reducing the laborious iterations of hand engineering. It automates the design of an optimization method based on its performance on a set of training problems. This data-driven procedure generates methods that can efficiently solve problems similar to those in the training. In sharp contrast, the typical and traditional designs of optimization methods are theory-driven, so they obtain performance guarantees over the classes of problems specified by the theory. The difference makes L2O suitable for repeatedly solving a certain type of optimization problems over a specific distribution of data, while it typically fails on out-of-distribution problems. The practicality of L2O depends on the type of target optimization, the chosen architecture of the method to learn, and the training procedure. This new paradigm has motivated a community of researchers to explore L2O and report their findings. This article is poised to be the first comprehensive survey and benchmark of L2O for continuous optimization. We set up taxonomies, categorize existing works and research directions, present insights, and identify open challenges. We also benchmarked many existing L2O approaches on a few but representative optimization problems. For reproducible research and fair benchmarking purposes, we released our software implementation and data in the package Open-L2O at https://github.com/VITA-Group/Open-L2O.

Reasoning language models (RLMs) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet they still suffer from a multilingual reasoning gap, performing better in high-resource languages than in low-resource ones. While recent efforts have reduced this gap, its underlying causes remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we address this by showing that the multilingual reasoning gap largely stems from failures in language understanding-the model's inability to represent the multilingual input meaning into the dominant language (i.e., English) within its reasoning trace. This motivates us to examine whether understanding failures can be detected, as this ability could help mitigate the multilingual reasoning gap. To this end, we evaluate a range of detection methods and find that understanding failures can indeed be identified, with supervised approaches performing best. Building on this, we propose Selective Translation, a simple yet effective strategy that translates the multilingual input into English only when an understanding failure is detected. Experimental results show that Selective Translation bridges the multilingual reasoning gap, achieving near full-translation performance while using translation for only about 20% of inputs. Together, our work demonstrates that understanding failures are the primary cause of the multilingual reasoning gap and can be detected and selectively mitigated, providing key insight into its origin and a promising path toward more equitable multilingual reasoning. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/deokhk/RLM_analysis.

Code translation aims to convert source code from one programming language (PL) to another. Given the promising abilities of large language models (LLMs) in code synthesis, researchers are exploring their potential to automate code translation. The prerequisite for advancing the state of LLM-based code translation is to understand their promises and limitations over existing techniques. To that end, we present a large-scale empirical study to investigate the ability of general LLMs and code LLMs for code translation across pairs of different languages, including C, C++, Go, Java, and Python. Our study, which involves the translation of 1,700 code samples from three benchmarks and two real-world projects, reveals that LLMs are yet to be reliably used to automate code translation -- with correct translations ranging from 2.1% to 47.3% for the studied LLMs. Further manual investigation of unsuccessful translations identifies 15 categories of translation bugs. We also compare LLM-based code translation with traditional non-LLM-based approaches. Our analysis shows that these two classes of techniques have their own strengths and weaknesses. Finally, insights from our study suggest that providing more context to LLMs during translation can help them produce better results. To that end, we propose a prompt-crafting approach based on the symptoms of erroneous translations; this improves the performance of LLM-based code translation by 5.5% on average. Our study is the first of its kind, in terms of scale and breadth, that provides insights into the current limitations of LLMs in code translation and opportunities for improving them. Our dataset -- consisting of 1,700 code samples in five PLs with 10K+ tests, 43K+ translated code, 1,725 manually labeled bugs, and 1,365 bug-fix pairs -- can help drive research in this area.

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant interest in natural language processing (NLP), particularly their remarkable performance in various downstream tasks in resource-rich languages. Recent studies have highlighted the limitations of LLMs in low-resource languages, primarily focusing on binary classification tasks and giving minimal attention to South Asian languages. These limitations are primarily attributed to constraints such as dataset scarcity, computational costs, and research gaps specific to low-resource languages. To address this gap, we present datasets for sentiment and hate speech tasks by translating from English to Bangla, Hindi, and Urdu, facilitating research in low-resource language processing. Further, we comprehensively examine zero-shot learning using multiple LLMs in English and widely spoken South Asian languages. Our findings indicate that GPT-4 consistently outperforms Llama 2 and Gemini, with English consistently demonstrating superior performance across diverse tasks compared to low-resource languages. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that natural language inference (NLI) exhibits the highest performance among the evaluated tasks, with GPT-4 demonstrating superior capabilities.

This study explores enhancing grammatical error correction (GEC) through artificial error generation (AEG) using language models (LMs). Specifically, we fine-tune Llama 2-based LMs for error generation and find that this approach yields synthetic errors akin to human errors. Next, we train GEC Llama models with the help of these artificial errors and outperform previous state-of-the-art error correction models, with gains ranging between 0.8 and 6 F0.5 points across all tested languages (German, Ukrainian, and Estonian). Moreover, we demonstrate that generating errors by fine-tuning smaller sequence-to-sequence models and prompting large commercial LMs (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) also results in synthetic errors beneficially affecting error generation models.

Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) is a critical task for designing effective retrieval-based Question Answering (QA) systems. Most advancements in AS2 focus on English due to the scarcity of annotated datasets for other languages. This lack of resources prevents the training of effective AS2 models in different languages, creating a performance gap between QA systems in English and other locales. In this paper, we introduce new high-quality datasets for AS2 in five European languages (French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish), obtained through supervised Automatic Machine Translation (AMT) of existing English AS2 datasets such as ASNQ, WikiQA, and TREC-QA using a Large Language Model (LLM). We evaluated our approach and the quality of the translated datasets through multiple experiments with different Transformer architectures. The results indicate that our datasets are pivotal in producing robust and powerful multilingual AS2 models, significantly contributing to closing the performance gap between English and other languages.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). LLMs require an extreme amount of parameters to attain high performance. As models grow into the trillion-parameter range, computational and memory costs increase significantly. This makes it difficult for many researchers to access the resources needed to train or apply these models. Optimizing LLM performance involves two main approaches: fine-tuning pre-trained models for specific tasks to achieve state-of-the-art performance, and reducing costs or improving training time while maintaining similar performance. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement. We reviewed 65 publications out of 983 from 2017 to December 2023, retrieved from 5 databases. The study presents methods to optimize and accelerate LLMs while achieving cutting-edge results without sacrificing accuracy. We begin with an overview of the development of language modeling, followed by a detailed explanation of commonly used frameworks and libraries, and a taxonomy for improving and speeding up LLMs based on three classes: LLM training, LLM inference, and system serving. We then delve into recent optimization and acceleration strategies such as training optimization, hardware optimization, scalability and reliability, accompanied by the taxonomy and categorization of these strategies. Finally, we provide an in-depth comparison of each class and strategy, with two case studies on optimizing model training and enhancing inference efficiency. These case studies showcase practical approaches to address LLM resource limitations while maintaining performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for zero-shot annotation and LLM-as-a-judge tasks, yet their reliability hinges on how model-internalized priors interact with user-provided instructions. We investigate three dimensions of this interaction: (1) how an LLM's familiarity with data and task definitions affects performance, (2) the extent to which additional information in prompts can correct zero-shot errors ("decision stickiness"), and (3) model susceptibility to misaligned task definitions. Through experiments on toxicity detection across diverse datasets (spanning social media, gaming, news, and forums) using both dense and mixture-of-experts models, we find that nearly two-thirds of zero-shot errors are resistant to correction, with an overall rescue rate (fraction of initial errors corrected by prompting) of only 34.8%. High-confidence errors prove especially resistant to correction. When given misaligned definitions, LLMs follow them while maintaining confidence levels unchanged from the aligned condition. Crucially, we introduce Definition-Specific Familiarity (DSF), which measures alignment between a model's internal concept and the task definition. After controlling for dataset-level confounds, DSF shows a positive association with model performance (partial r = +0.41), while three distinct memorization metrics (ROUGE-L, BERTScore, and embedding cosine similarity) all fail to show a positive association. These findings show the limitations of prompt-based correction in annotation tasks, highlighting the importance of definition alignment over text-level memorization.

Most work in NLP makes the assumption that it is desirable to develop solutions in the native language in question. There is consequently a strong trend towards building native language models even for low-resource languages. This paper questions this development, and explores the idea of simply translating the data into English, thereby enabling the use of pretrained, and large-scale, English language models. We demonstrate empirically that a large English language model coupled with modern machine translation outperforms native language models in most Scandinavian languages. The exception to this is Finnish, which we assume is due to inferior translation quality. Our results suggest that machine translation is a mature technology, which raises a serious counter-argument for training native language models for low-resource languages. This paper therefore strives to make a provocative but important point. As English language models are improving at an unprecedented pace, which in turn improves machine translation, it is from an empirical and environmental stand-point more effective to translate data from low-resource languages into English, than to build language models for such languages.

Cross-cultural understanding has become increasingly important in today's highly connected, cross-national world. The success of LLM-based technologies is now driving the development of automated tools to aid understanding for nonnative people trying to succeed in cross-cultural environments. Building such automated tools is often done by leveraging in-thewild text, audio, and video data. This paper presents techniques for improving speech recognition-based transcript creation in multiple languages from videos to better train these automated tools. The focus is on processes and speech tools that can easily be used by cross-cultural tool builders without requiring deep speech processing expertise. Using publicly available videos from YouTube and Whisper-based tools, average transcription error rate across seven languages (Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Turkish, Russian, and Hebrew) of 30% are observed. With a modest amount of fine-tuning data, the average error rate can be reduced to 20% making such output much more usable for downstream processing. Speech and metadata associated with these videos that can be used by the community to further refine these experiments are released as well.

Despite speech recognition systems achieving low word error rates on standard benchmarks, they often fail on short, high-stakes utterances in real-world deployments. Here, we study this failure mode in a high-stakes task: the transcription of U.S. street names as spoken by U.S. participants. We evaluate 15 models from OpenAI, Deepgram, Google, and Microsoft on recordings from linguistically diverse U.S. speakers and find an average transcription error rate of 44%. We quantify the downstream impact of failed transcriptions by geographic locations and show that mis-transcriptions systematically cause errors for all speakers, but that routing distance errors are twice as large for non-English primary speakers compared to English primary speakers. To mitigate this harm, we introduce a synthetic data generation approach that produces diverse pronunciations of named entities using open-source text-to-speech models. Fine-tuning with less than 1,000 synthetic samples improves street name transcription accuracy by nearly 60% (relative to base models) for non-English primary speakers. Our results highlight a critical gap between benchmark performance and real-world reliability in speech systems and demonstrate a simple, scalable path to reducing high-stakes transcription errors.

The MEDIQA-CORR 2024 shared task aims to assess the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify and correct medical errors in clinical notes. In this study, we evaluate the capability of general LLMs, specifically GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, to identify and correct medical errors with multiple prompting strategies. Recognising the limitation of LLMs in generating accurate corrections only via prompting strategies, we propose incorporating error-span predictions from a smaller, fine-tuned model in two ways: 1) by presenting it as a hint in the prompt and 2) by framing it as multiple-choice questions from which the LLM can choose the best correction. We found that our proposed prompting strategies significantly improve the LLM's ability to generate corrections. Our best-performing solution with 8-shot + CoT + hints ranked sixth in the shared task leaderboard. Additionally, our comprehensive analyses show the impact of the location of the error sentence, the prompted role, and the position of the multiple-choice option on the accuracy of the LLM. This prompts further questions about the readiness of LLM to be implemented in real-world clinical settings.

Large language models, particularly multilingual ones, are designed, claimed, and expected to cater to native speakers of varied languages. We hypothesise that the current practices of fine-tuning and evaluating these models may mismatch this intention owing to a heavy reliance on translation, which can introduce translation artefacts and defects. It remains unknown whether the nature of the instruction data has an impact on the model output; on the other hand, it remains questionable whether translated test sets can capture such nuances. Due to the often coupled practices of using translated data in both stages, such imperfections could have been overlooked. This work investigates these issues by using controlled native or translated data during instruction tuning and evaluation stages and observing model results. Experiments on eight base models and eight different benchmarks reveal that native or generation benchmarks display a notable difference between native and translated instruction data especially when model performance is high, whereas other types of test sets cannot. Finally, we demonstrate that regularization is beneficial to bridging this gap on structured but not generative tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) recently exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities on solving math problems. To further improve this capability, this work proposes Learning from Mistakes (LeMa), akin to human learning processes. Consider a human student who failed to solve a math problem, he will learn from what mistake he has made and how to correct it. Mimicking this error-driven learning process, LeMa fine-tunes LLMs on mistake-correction data pairs generated by GPT-4. Specifically, we first collect inaccurate reasoning paths from various LLMs and then employ GPT-4 as a "corrector" to (1) identify the mistake step, (2) explain the reason for the mistake, and (3) correct the mistake and generate the final answer. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LeMa: across five backbone LLMs and two mathematical reasoning tasks, LeMa consistently improves the performance compared with fine-tuning on CoT data alone. Impressively, LeMa can also benefit specialized LLMs such as WizardMath and MetaMath, achieving 85.4% pass@1 accuracy on GSM8K and 27.1% on MATH. This surpasses the SOTA performance achieved by non-execution open-source models on these challenging tasks. Our code, data and models will be publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/CodeT.

Context: Code reviews are crucial for software quality. Recent AI advances have allowed large language models (LLMs) to review and fix code; now, there are tools that perform these reviews. However, their reliability and accuracy have not yet been systematically evaluated. Objective: This study compares different LLMs' performance in detecting code correctness and suggesting improvements. Method: We tested GPT4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash on 492 AI generated code blocks of varying correctness, along with 164 canonical code blocks from the HumanEval benchmark. To simulate the code review task objectively, we expected LLMs to assess code correctness and improve the code if needed. We ran experiments with different configurations and reported on the results. Results: With problem descriptions, GPT4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash correctly classified code correctness 68.50% and 63.89% of the time, respectively, and corrected the code 67.83% and 54.26% of the time for the 492 code blocks of varying correctness. Without problem descriptions, performance declined. The results for the 164 canonical code blocks differed, suggesting that performance depends on the type of code. Conclusion: LLM code reviews can help suggest improvements and assess correctness, but there is a risk of faulty outputs. We propose a process that involves humans, called the "Human in the loop LLM Code Review" to promote knowledge sharing while mitigating the risk of faulty outputs.

Recent research has demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their capabilities by utilizing external tools. However, three pivotal questions remain unanswered: (1) How effective are current LLMs in utilizing tools? (2) How can we enhance LLMs' ability to utilize tools? (3) What obstacles need to be overcome to leverage tools? To address these questions, we introduce API-Bank, a groundbreaking benchmark, specifically designed for tool-augmented LLMs. For the first question, we develop a runnable evaluation system consisting of 73 API tools. We annotate 314 tool-use dialogues with 753 API calls to assess the existing LLMs' capabilities in planning, retrieving, and calling APIs. For the second question, we construct a comprehensive training set containing 1,888 tool-use dialogues from 2,138 APIs spanning 1,000 distinct domains. Using this dataset, we train Lynx, a tool-augmented LLM initialized from Alpaca. Experimental results demonstrate that GPT-3.5 exhibits improved tool utilization compared to GPT-3, while GPT-4 excels in planning. However, there is still significant potential for further improvement. Moreover, Lynx surpasses Alpaca's tool utilization performance by more than 26 pts and approaches the effectiveness of GPT-3.5. Through error analysis, we highlight the key challenges for future research in this field to answer the third question.

Large Language Model (LLM) libraries have emerged as the foundational infrastructure powering today's AI revolution, serving as the backbone for LLM deployment, inference optimization, fine-tuning, and production serving across diverse applications. Despite their critical role in the LLM ecosystem, these libraries face frequent quality issues and bugs that threaten the reliability of AI systems built upon them. To address this knowledge gap, we present the first comprehensive empirical investigation into bug characteristics and testing practices in modern LLM libraries. We examine 313 bug-fixing commits extracted across two widely-adopted LLM libraries: HuggingFace Transformers and vLLM.Through rigorous manual analysis, we establish comprehensive taxonomies categorizing bug symptoms into 5 types and root causes into 14 distinct categories.Our primary discovery shows that API misuse has emerged as the predominant root cause (32.17%-48.19%), representing a notable transition from algorithm-focused defects in conventional deep learning frameworks toward interface-oriented problems. Additionally, we examine 7,748 test functions to identify 7 distinct test oracle categories employed in current testing approaches, with predefined expected outputs (such as specific tensors and text strings) being the most common strategy. Our assessment of existing testing effectiveness demonstrates that the majority of bugs escape detection due to inadequate test cases (41.73%), lack of test drivers (32.37%), and weak test oracles (25.90%). Drawing from these findings, we offer some recommendations for enhancing LLM library quality assurance.

With the success of large-scale pre-training and multilingual modeling in Natural Language Processing (NLP), recent years have seen a proliferation of large, web-mined text datasets covering hundreds of languages. We manually audit the quality of 205 language-specific corpora released with five major public datasets (CCAligned, ParaCrawl, WikiMatrix, OSCAR, mC4). Lower-resource corpora have systematic issues: At least 15 corpora have no usable text, and a significant fraction contains less than 50% sentences of acceptable quality. In addition, many are mislabeled or use nonstandard/ambiguous language codes. We demonstrate that these issues are easy to detect even for non-proficient speakers, and supplement the human audit with automatic analyses. Finally, we recommend techniques to evaluate and improve multilingual corpora and discuss potential risks that come with low-quality data releases.

In this paper, we evaluate the capacity of current language technologies to understand Basque and Spanish language varieties. We use Natural Language Inference (NLI) as a pivot task and introduce a novel, manually-curated parallel dataset in Basque and Spanish, along with their respective variants. Our empirical analysis of crosslingual and in-context learning experiments using encoder-only and decoder-based Large Language Models (LLMs) shows a performance drop when handling linguistic variation, especially in Basque. Error analysis suggests that this decline is not due to lexical overlap, but rather to the linguistic variation itself. Further ablation experiments indicate that encoder-only models particularly struggle with Western Basque, which aligns with linguistic theory that identifies peripheral dialects (e.g., Western) as more distant from the standard. All data and code are publicly available.

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has transformed the competitive landscape in natural language processing (NLP), particularly for English and other data-rich languages. However, underrepresented languages like Cantonese, spoken by over 85 million people, face significant development gaps, which is particularly concerning given the economic significance of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, and in substantial Cantonese-speaking populations in places like Singapore and North America. Despite its wide use, Cantonese has scant representation in NLP research, especially compared to other languages from similarly developed regions. To bridge these gaps, we outline current Cantonese NLP methods and introduce new benchmarks designed to evaluate LLM performance in factual generation, mathematical logic, complex reasoning, and general knowledge in Cantonese, which aim to advance open-source Cantonese LLM technology. We also propose future research directions and recommended models to enhance Cantonese LLM development.

Language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in solving reasoning tasks; however, even the strongest models still occasionally make reasoning mistakes. Recently, there has been active research aimed at improving reasoning accuracy, particularly by using pretrained language models to "self-correct" their mistakes via multi-round prompting. In this paper, we follow this line of work but focus on understanding the usefulness of incorporating "error-correction" data directly into the pretraining stage. This data consists of erroneous solution steps immediately followed by their corrections. Using a synthetic math dataset, we show promising results: this type of pretrain data can help language models achieve higher reasoning accuracy directly (i.e., through simple auto-regression, without multi-round prompting) compared to pretraining on the same amount of error-free data. We also delve into many details, such as (1) how this approach differs from beam search, (2) how such data can be prepared, (3) whether masking is needed on the erroneous tokens, (4) the amount of error required, (5) whether such data can be deferred to the fine-tuning stage, and many others.

Although LLMs are increasing the productivity of professional programmers, existing work shows that beginners struggle to prompt LLMs to solve text-to-code tasks. Why is this the case? This paper explores two competing hypotheses about the cause of student-LLM miscommunication: (1) students simply lack the technical vocabulary needed to write good prompts, and (2) students do not understand the extent of information that LLMs need to solve code generation tasks. We study (1) with a causal intervention experiment on technical vocabulary and (2) by analyzing graphs that abstract how students edit prompts and the different failures that they encounter. We find that substance beats style: a poor grasp of technical vocabulary is merely correlated with prompt failure; that the information content of prompts predicts success; that students get stuck making trivial edits; and more. Our findings have implications for the use of LLMs in programming education, and for efforts to make computing more accessible with LLMs.

Code translation converts code from one programming language to another while maintaining its original functionality, which is crucial for software migration, system refactoring, and cross-platform development. Traditional rule-based methods rely on manually-written rules, which can be time-consuming and often result in less readable code. To overcome this, learning-based methods have been developed, leveraging parallel data to train models for automated code translation. More recently, the advance of Large Language Models (LLMs) further boosts learning-based code translation. Although promising, LLM-translated program still suffers from diverse quality issues (e.g., syntax errors and semantic errors). In particular, it can be challenging for LLMs to self-debug these errors when simply provided with the corresponding error messages. In this work, we propose a novel LLM-based multi-agent system TRANSAGENT, which enhances LLM-based code translation by fixing the syntax errors and semantic errors with the synergy between four LLM-based agents, including Initial Code Translator, Syntax Error Fixer, Code Aligner, and Semantic Error Fixer. The main insight of TRANSAGENT is to first localize the error code block in the target program based on the execution alignment between the target and source program, which can narrow down the fixing space and thus lower down the fixing difficulties. To evaluate TRANSAGENT, we first construct a new benchmark from recent programming tasks to mitigate the potential data leakage issue. On our benchmark, TRANSAGENT outperforms the latest LLM-based code translation technique UniTrans in both translation effectiveness and efficiency; additionally, our evaluation on different LLMs show the generalization of TRANSAGENT and our ablation study shows the contribution of each agent.

Reasoning language models have made substantial advances on a variety of complex tasks, yet their capabilities remain overwhelmingly English-centric: models primarily reason in English regardless of the language they are prompted in. This is inaccessible for non-English-speaking users, risks losing the intent of the original question, and forgoes knowledge more readily expressed in the target language. In this work, we advance L2 reasoning, the ability of a model to reason consistently in the language of the user's prompt, thus building an in-language bridge between the prompt and the answer. We approach this problem from a data-centric angle, investigating how to optimize data composition and scheduling in SFT for reasoning generalization. Building Tiny Aya L2-Thinker at 3.35B scale, we achieve an L2 reasoning rate above 93% across 60 languages on 6 benchmarks spanning math, commonsense reasoning, instruction following, open-ended generation, and cultural reasoning while keeping performance strong. We show the path to generalizing L2 reasoning to held-out languages goes through broader language coverage, readily available multilingual non-reasoning data, and a sufficient English reasoning backbone. These findings indicate that reasoning is a language-agnostic behavior that can be transferred across typologically diverse languages through careful data mixing and without requiring reasoning supervision in every target language. We release our model weights and multilingual reasoning data to support further research on accessible, in-language reasoning.

Multilingual natural language processing is getting increased attention, with numerous models, benchmarks, and methods being released for many languages. English is often used in multilingual evaluation to prompt language models (LMs), mainly to overcome the lack of instruction tuning data in other languages. In this position paper, we lay out two roles of English in multilingual LM evaluations: as an interface and as a natural language. We argue that these roles have different goals: task performance versus language understanding. This discrepancy is highlighted with examples from datasets and evaluation setups. Numerous works explicitly use English as an interface to boost task performance. We recommend to move away from this imprecise method and instead focus on furthering language understanding.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation, yet they exhibit systematic errors on complex, multi-step programming tasks. We hypothesize that these errors stem from the flexibility of general-purpose languages, which permits multiple valid approaches and requires implicit state management. To test this hypothesis, we introduce Anka, a domain-specific language (DSL) for data transformation pipelines designed with explicit, constrained syntax that reduces ambiguity in code generation. Despite having zero prior training exposure to Anka, Claude 3.5 Haiku achieves 99.9% parse success and 95.8% overall task accuracy across 100 benchmark problems. Critically, Anka demonstrates a 40 percentage point accuracy advantage over Python on multi-step pipeline tasks (100% vs. 60%), where Python's flexible syntax leads to frequent errors in operation sequencing and variable management. Cross-model validation with GPT-4o-mini confirms this advantage (+26.7 percentage points on multi-step tasks). Our results demonstrate that: (1) LLMs can learn novel DSLs entirely from in-context prompts, achieving near-native accuracy; (2) constrained syntax significantly reduces errors on complex tasks; and (3) domain-specific languages purposefully designed for LLM generation can outperform general-purpose languages on which the LLM has extensive training. We release the complete language implementation, benchmark suite, and evaluation framework to facilitate further research.

While the rise of large language models (LLMs) has created rich new opportunities to learn about digital technology, many on the margins of this technology struggle to gain and maintain competency due to lexical or conceptual barriers that prevent them from asking appropriate questions. Although there have been many efforts to understand factuality of LLM-created content and ability of LLMs to answer questions, it is not well understood how unclear or nonstandard language queries affect the model outputs. We propose the creation of a dataset that captures questions of digital newcomers and outsiders, utilizing data we have compiled from a decade's worth of one-on-one tutoring. In this paper we lay out our planned efforts and some potential uses of this dataset.

While large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, they pose potential safety concerns, such as the ``jailbreak'' problem, wherein malicious instructions can manipulate LLMs to exhibit undesirable behavior. Although several preventive measures have been developed to mitigate the potential risks associated with LLMs, they have primarily focused on English data. In this study, we reveal the presence of multilingual jailbreak challenges within LLMs and consider two potential risk scenarios: unintentional and intentional. The unintentional scenario involves users querying LLMs using non-English prompts and inadvertently bypassing the safety mechanisms, while the intentional scenario concerns malicious users combining malicious instructions with multilingual prompts to deliberately attack LLMs. The experimental results reveal that in the unintentional scenario, the rate of unsafe content increases as the availability of languages decreases. Specifically, low-resource languages exhibit three times the likelihood of encountering harmful content compared to high-resource languages, with both ChatGPT and GPT-4. In the intentional scenario, multilingual prompts can exacerbate the negative impact of malicious instructions, with astonishingly high rates of unsafe output: 80.92\% for ChatGPT and 40.71\% for GPT-4. To handle such a challenge in the multilingual context, we propose a novel Self-Defense framework that automatically generates multilingual training data for safety fine-tuning. Experimental results show that ChatGPT fine-tuned with such data can achieve a substantial reduction in unsafe content generation. Data is available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/multilingual-safety-for-LLMs. Warning: This paper contains examples with potentially harmful content.

To combat the misuse of Large Language Models (LLMs), many recent studies have presented LLM-generated-text detectors with promising performance. When users instruct LLMs to generate texts, the instruction can include different constraints depending on the user's need. However, most recent studies do not cover such diverse instruction patterns when creating datasets for LLM detection. In this paper, we reveal that even task-oriented constraints -- constraints that would naturally be included in an instruction and are not related to detection-evasion -- cause existing powerful detectors to have a large variance in detection performance. We focus on student essay writing as a realistic domain and manually create task-oriented constraints based on several factors for essay quality. Our experiments show that the standard deviation (SD) of current detector performance on texts generated by an instruction with such a constraint is significantly larger (up to an SD of 14.4 F1-score) than that by generating texts multiple times or paraphrasing the instruction. We also observe an overall trend where the constraints can make LLM detection more challenging than without them. Finally, our analysis indicates that the high instruction-following ability of LLMs fosters the large impact of such constraints on detection performance.

Although large language models (LLMs) have become transformative, they still make mistakes and can explore unproductive reasoning paths. Self-correction is an important capability for a trustworthy LLM, particularly an autoregressive LLM. While LLMs can identify error in user input, they exhibit a systematic 'Self-Correction Blind Spot' - failing to correct identical error in their own outputs. To systematically study this phenomenon, we introduce Self-Correction Bench, a systematic framework to measure this phenomenon through controlled error injection at three complexity levels. Testing 14 models, we find an average 64.5% blind spot rate. We find multiple evidences that this limitation relates to training data composition: human training demonstrations predominantly show error-free responses rather than error-correction sequences, unlike RL-trained models that learn error correction through outcome feedback. Remarkably, simply appending "Wait" reduces blind spots by 89.3%, suggesting that the capability exists but requires activation. Our work highlights a critical limitation in current LLMs and offers potential avenues for improving their reliability and trustworthiness.

Instruction tuning is essential for large language models (LLMs) to become interactive. While many instruction tuning datasets exist in English, there is a noticeable lack in other languages. Also, their effectiveness has not been well verified in non-English languages. We construct a Japanese instruction dataset by expanding and filtering existing datasets and apply the dataset to a Japanese pre-trained base model. We performed Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) tuning on both Japanese and English existing models using our instruction dataset. We evaluated these models from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. As a result, the effectiveness of Japanese instruction datasets is confirmed. The results also indicate that even with relatively small LLMs, performances in downstream tasks would be improved through instruction tuning. Our instruction dataset, tuned models, and implementation are publicly available online.

Traditionally, success in multilingual machine translation can be attributed to three key factors in training data: large volume, diverse translation directions, and high quality. In the current practice of fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for translation, we revisit the importance of all these factors. We find that LLMs display strong translation capability after being fine-tuned on as few as 32 training instances, and that fine-tuning on a single translation direction effectively enables LLMs to translate in multiple directions. However, the choice of direction is critical: fine-tuning LLMs with English on the target side can lead to task misinterpretation, which hinders translations into non-English languages. A similar problem arises when noise is introduced into the target side of parallel data, especially when the target language is well-represented in the LLM's pre-training. In contrast, noise in an under-represented language has a less pronounced effect. Our findings suggest that attaining successful alignment hinges on teaching the model to maintain a "superficial" focus, thereby avoiding the learning of erroneous biases beyond translation.

We show that content on the web is often translated into many languages, and the low quality of these multi-way translations indicates they were likely created using Machine Translation (MT). Multi-way parallel, machine generated content not only dominates the translations in lower resource languages; it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages. We also find evidence of a selection bias in the type of content which is translated into many languages, consistent with low quality English content being translated en masse into many lower resource languages, via MT. Our work raises serious concerns about training models such as multilingual large language models on both monolingual and bilingual data scraped from the web.

LangProp is a framework for iteratively optimizing code generated by large language models (LLMs) in a supervised/reinforcement learning setting. While LLMs can generate sensible solutions zero-shot, the solutions are often sub-optimal. Especially for code generation tasks, it is likely that the initial code will fail on certain edge cases. LangProp automatically evaluates the code performance on a dataset of input-output pairs, as well as catches any exceptions, and feeds the results back to the LLM in the training loop, so that the LLM can iteratively improve the code it generates. By adopting a metric- and data-driven training paradigm for this code optimization procedure, one could easily adapt findings from traditional machine learning techniques such as imitation learning, DAgger, and reinforcement learning. We demonstrate the first proof of concept of automated code optimization for autonomous driving in CARLA, showing that LangProp can generate interpretable and transparent driving policies that can be verified and improved in a metric- and data-driven way. Our code will be open-sourced and is available at https://github.com/shuishida/LangProp.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results in the machine translation evaluation task, yet there remains a gap in knowledge regarding how they utilize the provided data to conduct evaluations. This study aims to explore how LLMs leverage source and reference information in evaluating translations, with the ultimate goal of better understanding the working mechanism of LLMs. To this end, we design the controlled experiments across various input modes and model types, and employ both coarse-grained and fine-grained prompts to discern the utility of source versus reference information. Surprisingly, we find that reference information significantly enhances the evaluation accuracy, while source information sometimes is counterproductive, indicating a lack of cross-lingual capability when using LLMs to evaluate translations. We further conduct a meta-evaluation for translation error detection of LLMs, observing a similar phenomenon. These findings also suggest a potential research direction for LLMs that fully exploits the cross-lingual capability of LLMs to achieve better performance in machine translation evaluation tasks.

This paper embarks on an exploration into the Large Language Model (LLM) datasets, which play a crucial role in the remarkable advancements of LLMs. The datasets serve as the foundational infrastructure analogous to a root system that sustains and nurtures the development of LLMs. Consequently, examination of these datasets emerges as a critical topic in research. In order to address the current lack of a comprehensive overview and thorough analysis of LLM datasets, and to gain insights into their current status and future trends, this survey consolidates and categorizes the fundamental aspects of LLM datasets from five perspectives: (1) Pre-training Corpora; (2) Instruction Fine-tuning Datasets; (3) Preference Datasets; (4) Evaluation Datasets; (5) Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) Datasets. The survey sheds light on the prevailing challenges and points out potential avenues for future investigation. Additionally, a comprehensive review of the existing available dataset resources is also provided, including statistics from 444 datasets, covering 8 language categories and spanning 32 domains. Information from 20 dimensions is incorporated into the dataset statistics. The total data size surveyed surpasses 774.5 TB for pre-training corpora and 700M instances for other datasets. We aim to present the entire landscape of LLM text datasets, serving as a comprehensive reference for researchers in this field and contributing to future studies. Related resources are available at: https://github.com/lmmlzn/Awesome-LLMs-Datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) even when trained without parallel data. Yet, despite the fact that the amount of training data is gigantic, they still struggle with translating rare words, particularly for low-resource languages. Even worse, it is usually unrealistic to retrieve relevant demonstrations for in-context learning with low-resource languages on LLMs, which restricts the practical use of LLMs for translation -- how should we mitigate this problem? To this end, we present a novel method, CoD, which augments LLMs with prior knowledge with the chains of multilingual dictionaries for a subset of input words to elicit translation abilities for LLMs. Extensive experiments indicate that augmenting ChatGPT with CoD elicits large gains by up to 13x ChrF++ points for MNMT (3.08 to 42.63 for English to Serbian written in Cyrillic script) on FLORES-200 full devtest set. We further demonstrate the importance of chaining the multilingual dictionaries, as well as the superiority of CoD to few-shot demonstration for low-resource languages.

Sailor2 is a family of cutting-edge multilingual language models for South-East Asian (SEA) languages, available in 1B, 8B, and 20B sizes to suit diverse applications. Building on Qwen2.5, Sailor2 undergoes continuous pre-training on 500B tokens (400B SEA-specific and 100B replay tokens) to support 13 SEA languages while retaining proficiency in Chinese and English. Sailor2-20B model achieves a 50-50 win rate against GPT-4o across SEA languages. We also deliver a comprehensive cookbook on how to develop the multilingual model in an efficient manner, including five key aspects: data curation, pre-training, post-training, model customization and evaluation. We hope that Sailor2 model (Apache 2.0 license) will drive language development in the SEA region, and Sailor2 cookbook will inspire researchers to build more inclusive LLMs for other under-served languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform exceedingly well in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks for many languages including English. However, despite being the fifth most-spoken language globally, Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) in Bangla remains underdeveloped. In this work, we investigate how LLMs can be leveraged for improving Bangla GEC. For that, we first do an extensive categorization of 12 error classes in Bangla, and take a survey of native Bangla speakers to collect real-world errors. We next devise a rule-based noise injection method to create grammatically incorrect sentences corresponding to correct ones. The Vaiyakarana dataset, thus created, consists of 5,67,422 sentences of which 2,27,119 are erroneous. This dataset is then used to instruction-tune LLMs for the task of GEC in Bangla. Evaluations show that instruction-tuning with \name improves GEC performance of LLMs by 3-7 percentage points as compared to the zero-shot setting, and makes them achieve human-like performance in grammatical error identification. Humans, though, remain superior in error correction.

Advanced applied mathematics problems are underrepresented in existing Large Language Model (LLM) benchmark datasets. To address this, we introduce HARDMath, a dataset inspired by a graduate course on asymptotic methods, featuring challenging applied mathematics problems that require analytical approximation techniques. These problems demand a combination of mathematical reasoning, computational tools, and subjective judgment, making them difficult for LLMs. Our framework auto-generates a large number of problems with solutions validated against numerical ground truths. We evaluate both open- and closed-source LLMs on HARDMath-mini, a sub-sampled test set of 366 problems, as well as on 40 word problems formulated in applied science contexts. Even leading closed-source models like GPT-4 achieve only 43.8% overall accuracy with few-shot Chain-of-Thought prompting, and all models demonstrate significantly lower performance compared to results on existing mathematics benchmark datasets. We additionally conduct a detailed error analysis to gain insights into the failure cases of LLMs. These results demonstrate limitations of current LLM performance on advanced graduate-level applied math problems and underscore the importance of datasets like HARDMath to advance mathematical abilities of LLMs.

It has been shown that the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) drops starkly in low-resource conditions, underperforming phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) and requiring large amounts of auxiliary data to achieve competitive results. In this paper, we re-assess the validity of these results, arguing that they are the result of lack of system adaptation to low-resource settings. We discuss some pitfalls to be aware of when training low-resource NMT systems, and recent techniques that have shown to be especially helpful in low-resource settings, resulting in a set of best practices for low-resource NMT. In our experiments on German--English with different amounts of IWSLT14 training data, we show that, without the use of any auxiliary monolingual or multilingual data, an optimized NMT system can outperform PBSMT with far less data than previously claimed. We also apply these techniques to a low-resource Korean-English dataset, surpassing previously reported results by 4 BLEU.

Large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for global enterprise applications due to substantial performance gaps between high-resource and mid/low-resource languages, driven by English-centric pretraining and internal reasoning biases. This inconsistency undermines customer experience and operational reliability in multilingual settings such as customer support, content moderation, and information retrieval. Even with advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, we observe up to an 29% accuracy drop in non-English languages compared to English. We propose a practical, batch-wise alignment strategy for fine-tuning LLMs, leveraging semantically equivalent multilingual data in each training batch to directly align model outputs across languages. This approach improves non-English accuracy by up to 23.9\% without compromising English performance, model reasoning, or retrieval quality. Our method is simple to implement, scalable, and integrates seamlessly with existing LLM training \& deployment pipelines, enabling more robust and equitable multilingual AI solutions in industry.

This paper presents teaching materials, particularly assignments and ideas for classroom activities, from a new course on large language models (LLMs) taught at Charles University. The assignments include experiments with LLM inference for weather report generation and machine translation. The classroom activities include class quizzes, focused research on downstream tasks and datasets, and an interactive "best paper" session aimed at reading and comprehension of research papers.

In recent years, multilingual machine translation models have achieved promising performance on low-resource language pairs by sharing information between similar languages, thus enabling zero-shot translation. To overcome the "curse of multilinguality", these models often opt for scaling up the number of parameters, which makes their use in resource-constrained environments challenging. We introduce SMaLL-100, a distilled version of the M2M-100 (12B) model, a massively multilingual machine translation model covering 100 languages. We train SMaLL-100 with uniform sampling across all language pairs and therefore focus on preserving the performance of low-resource languages. We evaluate SMaLL-100 on different low-resource benchmarks: FLORES-101, Tatoeba, and TICO-19 and demonstrate that it outperforms previous massively multilingual models of comparable sizes (200-600M) while improving inference latency and memory usage. Additionally, our model achieves comparable results to M2M-100 (1.2B), while being 3.6x smaller and 4.3x faster at inference. Code and pre-trained models: https://github.com/alirezamshi/small100