arXiv subjects

Furong Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Furong Huang.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

MergeME: Model Merging Techniques for Homogeneous and Heterogeneous MoEs

The recent success of specialized Large Language Models (LLMs) in domains such as mathematical reasoning and coding has led to growing interest in methods for merging these expert LLMs into a unified Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, with the goal of enhancing performance in each domain while retaining effectiveness on general tasks. However, the effective merging of expert models remains an open challenge, especially for models with highly divergent weight parameters or different architectures. State-of-the-art MoE merging methods only work with homogeneous model architectures and rely on simple unweighted averaging to merge expert layers, which does not address parameter interference and requires extensive fine-tuning of the merged MoE to restore performance. To address these limitations, this paper introduces new MoE merging techniques, including strategies to mitigate parameter interference, routing heuristics to reduce the need for MoE fine-tuning, and a novel method for merging experts with different architectures. Extensive experiments across multiple domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, reducing fine-tuning costs, improving performance over state-of-the-art methods, and expanding the applicability of MoE merging.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Visual-Language Modality Alignment in Large Vision Language Models via Self-Improvement

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved impressive results in visual question-answering and reasoning tasks through vision instruction tuning on specific datasets. However, there remains significant room for improvement in aligning visual and language modalities. Existing methods often depend on external models or data, leading to uncontrollable and unstable alignment results. In this paper, we propose SIMA, a self-improvement framework that enhances visual and language modality alignment without external dependencies. SIMA leverages existing vision instruction tuning datasets to self-generate responses, incorporating an in-context self-critic mechanism that constructs preference pairs for tuning. Crucially, our approach allows LVLMs to act as critics by designing effective critic prompts, eliminating the need for additional fine-tuning with external instruction data. We introduce three novel visual metrics within the self-critic process to guide judgment, significantly improving the accuracy of self-critic. Through extensive experiments across 14 hallucination and comprehensive benchmarks, we demonstrate that SIMA significantly improves LVLM's performance and outperforms previous approaches, achieving superior modality alignment.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

GFairHint: Improving Individual Fairness for Graph Neural Networks via Fairness Hint

Given the growing concerns about fairness in machine learning and the impressive performance of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on graph data learning, algorithmic fairness in GNNs has attracted significant attention. While many existing studies improve fairness at the group level, only a few works promote individual fairness, which renders similar outcomes for similar individuals. A desirable framework that promotes individual fairness should (1) balance between fairness and performance, (2) accommodate two commonly-used individual similarity measures (externally annotated and computed from input features), (3) generalize across various GNN models, and (4) be computationally efficient. Unfortunately, none of the prior work achieves all the desirables. In this work, we propose a novel method, GFairHint, which promotes individual fairness in GNNs and achieves all aforementioned desirables. GFairHint learns fairness representations through an auxiliary link prediction task, and then concatenates the representations with the learned node embeddings in original GNNs as a "fairness hint". Through extensive experimental investigations on five real-world graph datasets under three prevalent GNN models covering both individual similarity measures above, GFairHint achieves the best fairness results in almost all combinations of datasets with various backbone models, while generating comparable utility results, with much less computational cost compared to the previous state-of-the-art (SoTA) method.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

MaxMin-RLHF: Alignment with Diverse Human Preferences

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns language models to human preferences by employing a singular reward model derived from preference data. However, such an approach overlooks the rich diversity of human preferences inherent in data collected from multiple users. In this work, we first derive an impossibility result of alignment with single reward RLHF, thereby highlighting its insufficiency in representing diverse human preferences. To provide an equitable solution to the problem, we learn a mixture of preference distributions via an expectation-maximization algorithm and propose a MaxMin alignment objective for policy learning inspired by the Egalitarian principle in social choice theory to better represent diverse human preferences. We elucidate the connection of our proposed approach to distributionally robust optimization and general utility RL, thereby highlighting the generality and robustness of our proposed solution. We present comprehensive experimental results on small-scale (GPT-2) and large-scale language models (with Tulu2-7B) and show the efficacy of the proposed approach in the presence of diversity among human preferences. Our algorithm achieves an average improvement of more than 16% in win-rates over conventional RLHF algorithms and improves the win-rate (accuracy) for minority groups by over 33% without compromising the performance of majority groups, showcasing the robustness and fairness of our approach. We remark that our findings in this work are not only limited to language models but also extend to reinforcement learning in general.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Adversarial Attacks on Large Language Models in Medicine

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into healthcare applications offers promising advancements in medical diagnostics, treatment recommendations, and patient care. However, the susceptibility of LLMs to adversarial attacks poses a significant threat, potentially leading to harmful outcomes in delicate medical contexts. This study investigates the vulnerability of LLMs to two types of adversarial attacks in three medical tasks. Utilizing real-world patient data, we demonstrate that both open-source and proprietary LLMs are susceptible to manipulation across multiple tasks. This research further reveals that domain-specific tasks demand more adversarial data in model fine-tuning than general domain tasks for effective attack execution, especially for more capable models. We discover that while integrating adversarial data does not markedly degrade overall model performance on medical benchmarks, it does lead to noticeable shifts in fine-tuned model weights, suggesting a potential pathway for detecting and countering model attacks. This research highlights the urgent need for robust security measures and the development of defensive mechanisms to safeguard LLMs in medical applications, to ensure their safe and effective deployment in healthcare settings.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Political-LLM: Large Language Models in Political Science

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in political science tasks such as election prediction, sentiment analysis, policy impact assessment, and misinformation detection. Meanwhile, the need to systematically understand how LLMs can further revolutionize the field also becomes urgent. In this work, we--a multidisciplinary team of researchers spanning computer science and political science--present the first principled framework termed Political-LLM to advance the comprehensive understanding of integrating LLMs into computational political science. Specifically, we first introduce a fundamental taxonomy classifying the existing explorations into two perspectives: political science and computational methodologies. In particular, from the political science perspective, we highlight the role of LLMs in automating predictive and generative tasks, simulating behavior dynamics, and improving causal inference through tools like counterfactual generation; from a computational perspective, we introduce advancements in data preparation, fine-tuning, and evaluation methods for LLMs that are tailored to political contexts. We identify key challenges and future directions, emphasizing the development of domain-specific datasets, addressing issues of bias and fairness, incorporating human expertise, and redefining evaluation criteria to align with the unique requirements of computational political science. Political-LLM seeks to serve as a guidebook for researchers to foster an informed, ethical, and impactful use of Artificial Intelligence in political science. Our online resource is available at: http://political-llm.org/.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Ensuring Safety and Trust: Analyzing the Risks of Large Language Models in Medicine

The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) make them increasingly compelling for adoption in real-world healthcare applications. However, the risks associated with using LLMs in medical applications have not been systematically characterized. We propose using five key principles for safe and trustworthy medical AI: Truthfulness, Resilience, Fairness, Robustness, and Privacy, along with ten specific aspects. Under this comprehensive framework, we introduce a novel MedGuard benchmark with 1,000 expert-verified questions. Our evaluation of 11 commonly used LLMs shows that the current language models, regardless of their safety alignment mechanisms, generally perform poorly on most of our benchmarks, particularly when compared to the high performance of human physicians. Despite recent reports indicate that advanced LLMs like ChatGPT can match or even exceed human performance in various medical tasks, this study underscores a significant safety gap, highlighting the crucial need for human oversight and the implementation of AI safety guardrails.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

ACE : Off-Policy Actor-Critic with Causality-Aware Entropy Regularization

The varying significance of distinct primitive behaviors during the policy learning process has been overlooked by prior model-free RL algorithms. Leveraging this insight, we explore the causal relationship between different action dimensions and rewards to evaluate the significance of various primitive behaviors during training. We introduce a causality-aware entropy term that effectively identifies and prioritizes actions with high potential impacts for efficient exploration. Furthermore, to prevent excessive focus on specific primitive behaviors, we analyze the gradient dormancy phenomenon and introduce a dormancy-guided reset mechanism to further enhance the efficacy of our method. Our proposed algorithm, ACE: Off-policy Actor-critic with Causality-aware Entropy regularization, demonstrates a substantial performance advantage across 29 diverse continuous control tasks spanning 7 domains compared to model-free RL baselines, which underscores the effectiveness, versatility, and efficient sample efficiency of our approach. Benchmark results and videos are available at https://ace-rl.github.io/.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Boosting Sample Efficiency and Generalization in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning via Equivariance

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) struggles with sample inefficiency and poor generalization [1]. These challenges are partially due to a lack of structure or inductive bias in the neural networks typically used in learning the policy. One such form of structure that is commonly observed in multi-agent scenarios is symmetry. The field of Geometric Deep Learning has developed Equivariant Graph Neural Networks (EGNN) that are equivariant (or symmetric) to rotations, translations, and reflections of nodes. Incorporating equivariance has been shown to improve learning efficiency and decrease error [ 2 ]. In this paper, we demonstrate that EGNNs improve the sample efficiency and generalization in MARL. However, we also show that a naive application of EGNNs to MARL results in poor early exploration due to a bias in the EGNN structure. To mitigate this bias, we present Exploration-enhanced Equivariant Graph Neural Networks or E2GN2. We compare E2GN2 to other common function approximators using common MARL benchmarks MPE and SMACv2. E2GN2 demonstrates a significant improvement in sample efficiency, greater final reward convergence, and a 2x-5x gain in over standard GNNs in our generalization tests. These results pave the way for more reliable and effective solutions in complex multi-agent systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Multi-Stage Balanced Distillation: Addressing Long-Tail Challenges in Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced various natural language processing tasks, but deploying them remains computationally expensive. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising solution, enabling the transfer of capabilities from larger teacher LLMs to more compact student models. Particularly, sequence-level KD, which distills rationale-based reasoning processes instead of merely final outcomes, shows great potential in enhancing students' reasoning capabilities. However, current methods struggle with sequence level KD under long-tailed data distributions, adversely affecting generalization on sparsely represented domains. We introduce the Multi-Stage Balanced Distillation (BalDistill) framework, which iteratively balances training data within a fixed computational budget. By dynamically selecting representative head domain examples and synthesizing tail domain examples, BalDistill achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-tailed datasets, enhancing both the efficiency and efficacy of the distilled models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Shadowcast: Stealthy Data Poisoning Attacks Against Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in generating textual responses from visual inputs, but their versatility raises security concerns. This study takes the first step in exposing VLMs' susceptibility to data poisoning attacks that can manipulate responses to innocuous, everyday prompts. We introduce Shadowcast, a stealthy data poisoning attack where poison samples are visually indistinguishable from benign images with matching texts. Shadowcast demonstrates effectiveness in two attack types. The first is a traditional Label Attack, tricking VLMs into misidentifying class labels, such as confusing Donald Trump for Joe Biden. The second is a novel Persuasion Attack, leveraging VLMs' text generation capabilities to craft persuasive and seemingly rational narratives for misinformation, such as portraying junk food as healthy. We show that Shadowcast effectively achieves the attacker's intentions using as few as 50 poison samples. Crucially, the poisoned samples demonstrate transferability across different VLM architectures, posing a significant concern in black-box settings. Moreover, Shadowcast remains potent under realistic conditions involving various text prompts, training data augmentation, and image compression techniques. This work reveals how poisoned VLMs can disseminate convincing yet deceptive misinformation to everyday, benign users, emphasizing the importance of data integrity for responsible VLM deployments. Our code is available at: https://github.com/umd-huang-lab/VLM-Poisoning.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

AutoHallusion: Automatic Generation of Hallucination Benchmarks for Vision-Language Models

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are prone to hallucinations, where certain contextual cues in an image can trigger the language module to produce overconfident and incorrect reasoning about abnormal or hypothetical objects. While some benchmarks have been developed to investigate LVLM hallucinations, they often rely on hand-crafted corner cases whose failure patterns may not generalize well. Additionally, fine-tuning on these examples could undermine their validity. To address this, we aim to scale up the number of cases through an automated approach, reducing human bias in crafting such corner cases. This motivates the development of AutoHallusion, the first automated benchmark generation approach that employs several key strategies to create a diverse range of hallucination examples. Our generated visual-question pairs pose significant challenges to LVLMs, requiring them to overcome contextual biases and distractions to arrive at correct answers. AutoHallusion enables us to create new benchmarks at the minimum cost and thus overcomes the fragility of hand-crafted benchmarks. It also reveals common failure patterns and reasons, providing key insights to detect, avoid, or control hallucinations. Comprehensive evaluations of top-tier LVLMs, e.g., GPT-4V(ision), Gemini Pro Vision, Claude 3, and LLaVA-1.5, show a 97.7% and 98.7% success rate of hallucination induction on synthetic and real-world datasets of AutoHallusion, paving the way for a long battle against hallucinations. The codebase and data can be accessed at https://github.com/wuxiyang1996/AutoHallusion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Towards Self-Improvement of LLMs via MCTS: Leveraging Stepwise Knowledge with Curriculum Preference Learning

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has recently emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Techniques such as SFT or DPO have enabled LLMs to distill high-quality behaviors from MCTS, improving their reasoning performance. However, existing distillation methods underutilize the rich trajectory information generated by MCTS, limiting the potential for improvements in LLM reasoning. In this paper, we propose AlphaLLM-CPL, a novel pairwise training framework that enables LLMs to self-improve through MCTS behavior distillation. AlphaLLM-CPL efficiently leverages MCTS trajectories via two key innovations: (1) AlphaLLM-CPL constructs stepwise trajectory pairs from child nodes sharing the same parent in the search tree, providing step-level information for more effective MCTS behavior distillation. (2) AlphaLLM-CPL introduces curriculum preference learning, dynamically adjusting the training sequence of trajectory pairs in each offline training epoch to prioritize critical learning steps and mitigate overfitting. Experimental results on mathematical reasoning tasks demonstrate that AlphaLLM-CPL significantly outperforms previous MCTS behavior distillation methods, substantially boosting the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

SAFLEX: Self-Adaptive Augmentation via Feature Label Extrapolation

Data augmentation, a cornerstone technique in deep learning, is crucial in enhancing model performance, especially with scarce labeled data. While traditional techniques are effective, their reliance on hand-crafted methods limits their applicability across diverse data types and tasks. Although modern learnable augmentation methods offer increased adaptability, they are computationally expensive and challenging to incorporate within prevalent augmentation workflows. In this work, we present a novel, efficient method for data augmentation, effectively bridging the gap between existing augmentation strategies and emerging datasets and learning tasks. We introduce SAFLEX (Self-Adaptive Augmentation via Feature Label EXtrapolation), which learns the sample weights and soft labels of augmented samples provided by any given upstream augmentation pipeline, using a specifically designed efficient bilevel optimization algorithm. Remarkably, SAFLEX effectively reduces the noise and label errors of the upstream augmentation pipeline with a marginal computational cost. As a versatile module, SAFLEX excels across diverse datasets, including natural and medical images and tabular data, showcasing its prowess in few-shot learning and out-of-distribution generalization. SAFLEX seamlessly integrates with common augmentation strategies like RandAug, CutMix, and those from large pre-trained generative models like stable diffusion and is also compatible with frameworks such as CLIP's fine-tuning. Our findings highlight the potential to adapt existing augmentation pipelines for new data types and tasks, signaling a move towards more adaptable and resilient training frameworks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT, have gained considerable attention for their excellent natural language processing capabilities. Nonetheless, these LLMs present many challenges, particularly in the realm of trustworthiness. Therefore, ensuring the trustworthiness of LLMs emerges as an important topic. This paper introduces TrustLLM, a comprehensive study of trustworthiness in LLMs, including principles for different dimensions of trustworthiness, established benchmark, evaluation, and analysis of trustworthiness for mainstream LLMs, and discussion of open challenges and future directions. Specifically, we first propose a set of principles for trustworthy LLMs that span eight different dimensions. Based on these principles, we further establish a benchmark across six dimensions including truthfulness, safety, fairness, robustness, privacy, and machine ethics. We then present a study evaluating 16 mainstream LLMs in TrustLLM, consisting of over 30 datasets. Our findings firstly show that in general trustworthiness and utility (i.e., functional effectiveness) are positively related. Secondly, our observations reveal that proprietary LLMs generally outperform most open-source counterparts in terms of trustworthiness, raising concerns about the potential risks of widely accessible open-source LLMs. However, a few open-source LLMs come very close to proprietary ones. Thirdly, it is important to note that some LLMs may be overly calibrated towards exhibiting trustworthiness, to the extent that they compromise their utility by mistakenly treating benign prompts as harmful and consequently not responding. Finally, we emphasize the importance of ensuring transparency not only in the models themselves but also in the technologies that underpin trustworthiness. Knowing the specific trustworthy technologies that have been employed is crucial for analyzing their effectiveness.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Safety Guaranteed Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Hierarchical Control for Connected and Automated Vehicles

We address the problem of coordination and control of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) in the presence of imperfect observations in mixed traffic environment. A commonly used approach is learning-based decision-making, such as reinforcement learning (RL). However, most existing safe RL methods suffer from two limitations: (i) they assume accurate state information, and (ii) safety is generally defined over the expectation of the trajectories. It remains challenging to design optimal coordination between multi-agents while ensuring hard safety constraints under system state uncertainties (e.g., those that arise from noisy sensor measurements, communication, or state estimation methods) at every time step. We propose a safety guaranteed hierarchical coordination and control scheme called Safe-RMM to address the challenge. Specifically, the high-level coordination policy of CAVs in mixed traffic environment is trained by the Robust Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (RMAPPO) method. Though trained without uncertainty, our method leverages a worst-case Q network to ensure the model's robust performances when state uncertainties are present during testing. The low-level controller is implemented using model predictive control (MPC) with robust Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to guarantee safety through their forward invariance property. We compare our method with baselines in different road networks in the CARLA simulator. Results show that our method provides best evaluated safety and efficiency in challenging mixed traffic environments with uncertainties.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Balancing Label Imbalance in Federated Environments Using Only Mixup and Artificially-Labeled Noise

Clients in a distributed or federated environment will often hold data skewed towards differing subsets of labels. This scenario, referred to as heterogeneous or non-iid federated learning, has been shown to significantly hinder model training and performance. In this work, we explore the limits of a simple yet effective augmentation strategy for balancing skewed label distributions: filling in underrepresented samples of a particular label class using pseudo-images. While existing algorithms exclusively train on pseudo-images such as mixups of local training data, our augmented client datasets consist of both real and pseudo-images. In further contrast to other literature, we (1) use a DP-Instahide variant to reduce the decodability of our image encodings and (2) as a twist, supplement local data using artificially labeled, training-free 'natural noise' generated by an untrained StyleGAN. These noisy images mimic the power spectra patterns present in natural scenes which, together with mixup images, help homogenize label distribution among clients. We demonstrate that small amounts of augmentation via mixups and natural noise markedly improve label-skewed CIFAR-10 and MNIST training.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

CSRec: Rethinking Sequential Recommendation from A Causal Perspective

The essence of sequential recommender systems (RecSys) lies in understanding how users make decisions. Most existing approaches frame the task as sequential prediction based on users' historical purchase records. While effective in capturing users' natural preferences, this formulation falls short in accurately modeling actual recommendation scenarios, particularly in accounting for how unsuccessful recommendations influence future purchases. Furthermore, the impact of the RecSys itself on users' decisions has not been appropriately isolated and quantitatively analyzed. To address these challenges, we propose a novel formulation of sequential recommendation, termed Causal Sequential Recommendation (CSRec). Instead of predicting the next item in the sequence, CSRec aims to predict the probability of a recommended item's acceptance within a sequential context and backtrack how current decisions are made. Critically, CSRec facilitates the isolation of various factors that affect users' final decisions, especially the influence of the recommender system itself, thereby opening new avenues for the design of recommender systems. CSRec can be seamlessly integrated into existing methodologies. Experimental evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed implementation significantly improves upon state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.IR↗