??Top ML Papers of the Week

Welcome to the Top ML Papers of the Week (October 14 - 20).

1). Thinking LLMs - proposes a training method to equip LLMs with thinking abilities for general instruction-following without human-annotated data; uses an iterative search and optimization procedure to explore thought generation which enables the model to learn without direct supervision; thought candidates for each user instruction are scored with a judge model; only responses are evaluated by the Judge which determines the best and worst ones; then the corresponding full outputs are used as chosen and rejected pairs for DPO (referred to as Thought Preference Optimization in this paper). reports superior performance on AlpacaEval and Arena-Hard. (paper | tweet )

2). Model Swarms - propose a new collaborative search algorithm to adapt LLM via swarm intelligence; a pool of LLM experts collaboratively move in the weight space and optimize a utility function representing various adaptation objectives; experiments demonstrate that Model Swarms could flexibly adapt LLM experts to a single task, multi-task domains, reward models, as well as diverse human interests; improves over 12 model composition baselines by up to 21.0% across tasks and contexts. (paper | tweet )

3). First-Person Fairness in Chatbots - studies first-person fairness which involves fairness towards users interacting with ChatGPT; specifically, it measures the biases, if any, towards the users’ names; it leverages a model powered by GPT-4o to analyze patterns and name-sensitivity in the chatbot’s responses for different user names; claims that, overall, post-training significantly mitigate harmful stereotypes; also reports that in domains like entertainment and art, with open-ended tasks, demonstrate the highest level of bias (i.e., tendency to write stories with protagonists whose gender matches gender inferred from the user’s name). (paper | tweet )

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4). Introspection in LLMs - reports that LLMs can acquire knowledge through introspection that cannot be inferred from their training data; suggests that LLMs contain privileged information about themselves that can potentially lead to more interpretable and controllable systems; they report that this introspection ability is limited and models struggle to predict their behavior on tasks requiring reasoning over long outputs. (paper | tweet )

5). Janus - proposes a unified autoregressive framework for multimodal understanding and generation; it decouples visual encoding into independent pathways and leverages a single transformer architecture to improve flexibility and performance on both visual understanding and generation; claims to alleviate trade-offs related to performing the vision tasks, something common in methods that rely on a single visual encoder; surpasses previous unified models and matches or exceeds the performance of task-specific models. (paper | tweet )

6). Inference Scaling for Long-Context RAG - uses two strategies to investigate scaling laws for RAG: in-context learning (DRAG) and iterative prompting (IterRAG); finds that RAG performance consistently improves with the expansion of the effective context length under optimal configurations; when optimally allocated, increasing inference computation can lead to linear gains in long-context RAG performance; this leads to the development of a computation allocation model that can provide practical guidance for optimal computation allocation in long-context RAG scenarios. (paper | tweet )

7). Agent S - a new open agentic framework that enables autonomous interaction with computers through a GUI; Agent S tackles challenges such as acquiring knowledge, planning over long-task horizons, and handling dynamic interfaces; it introduces experience-augmented hierarchical planning which leverages both search and retrieval; leverages an agent-computer interface to perform reasoning and control GUI agents; evaluation on the OSWorld benchmark shows that Agent S outperforms the baseline by 9.37% in success rate (an 83.6% relative improvement) and achieves a new state-of-the-art. (paper | tweet )

8). Model Kinship for Merging LLMs - proposes model kinship to measure the degree of similarity between LLMs; model kinship is used to build a model merging strategy (Top-k Greedy Merging with Model Kinship) which yields better performance; the authors find that this new criterion can be used to effectively and continuously perform model merging. (paper | tweet )

9). On the Planning Abilities of OpenAI’s o1 Models - reports that o1-preview is particularly strong in self-evaluation and constraint-following; also mentions that these o1 models demonstrate bottlenecks in decision-making and memory management, which are more pronounced in spatial reasoning; in particular, the models produce redundant action and struggle to generalize in spatially complex tasks. (paper | tweet )

10). CoTracker3 - proposes a new point tracking model and a new semi-supervised training recipe; enables usage of real videos without annotations during training by generating pseudo-labels using off-the-shelf teachers; the approach is simpler in architecture and training scheme leading to better results while using 1000x less data. (paper | tweet )

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