Evolution and Prospects of Foundation Models: From Large Language Models to Large Multimodal Models

Since the 1950s,when the Turing Test was introduced,there has been notable progress in machine language intelligence.Language modeling,crucial for AI development,has evolved from statistical to neural models over the last two decades.Recently,transformer-based Pre-trained Language Models(PLM)have excelled in Natural Language Processing(NLP)tasks by leveraging large-scale training corpora.Increasing the scale of these models enhances performance significantly,introducing abilities like context learning that smaller models lack.The advancement in Large Language Models,exemplified by the development of ChatGPT,has made significant impacts both academically and industrially,capturing widespread societal interest.This survey provides an overview of the development and prospects from Large Language Models(LLM)to Large Multimodal Models(LMM).It first discusses the contributions and technological advancements of LLMs in the field of natural language processing,especially in text generation and language understanding.Then,it turns to the discussion of LMMs,which integrates various data modalities such as text,images,and sound,demonstrating advanced capabilities in understanding and generating cross-modal content,paving new pathways for the adaptability and flexibility of AI systems.Finally,the survey highlights the prospects of LMMs in terms of technological development and application potential,while also pointing out challenges in data integration,cross-modal understanding accuracy,providing a comprehensive perspective on the latest developments in this field.

Systematizing Teacher Development:A Review of Foreign Language Teacher Learning

Foreign language teaching practice is developing rapidly,but research on foreign language teacher learning is currently relatively fragmented and unstructured.The book Foreign Language Teacher Learning,written by Professor Kang Yan from Capital Normal University,published in September 2022,makes a systematic introduction to foreign language teacher learning,which to some extent makes up for this shortcoming.Her book presents the lineage of foreign language teacher learning research at home and abroad,analyzes both theoretical and practical aspects,reviews the cuttingedge research results,and foresees the future development trend,painting a complete research picture for researchers in the field of foreign language teaching and teacher education as well as front-line teachers interested in foreign language teacher learning.This is an important inspiration for conducting foreign language teacher learning research in the future.And this paper makes a review of the book from aspects such as its content,major characteristics,contributions and limitations.

DeBERTa-GRU: Sentiment Analysis for Large Language Model

Modern technological advancements have made social media an essential component of daily life.Social media allow individuals to share thoughts,emotions,and ideas.Sentiment analysis plays the function of evaluating whether the sentiment of the text is positive,negative,neutral,or any other personal emotion to understand the sentiment context of the text.Sentiment analysis is essential in business and society because it impacts strategic decision-making.Sentiment analysis involves challenges due to lexical variation,an unlabeled dataset,and text distance correlations.The execution time increases due to the sequential processing of the sequence models.However,the calculation times for the Transformer models are reduced because of the parallel processing.This study uses a hybrid deep learning strategy to combine the strengths of the Transformer and Sequence models while ignoring their limitations.In particular,the proposed model integrates the Decoding-enhanced with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers(BERT)attention(DeBERTa)and the Gated Recurrent Unit(GRU)for sentiment analysis.Using the Decoding-enhanced BERT technique,the words are mapped into a compact,semantic word embedding space,and the Gated Recurrent Unit model can capture the distance contextual semantics correctly.The proposed hybrid model achieves F1-scores of 97%on the Twitter Large Language Model(LLM)dataset,which is much higher than the performance of new techniques.

Enhancing Orthopedic Knowledge Assessments:The Performance of Specialized Generative Language Model Optimization

Objective This study aimed to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of knowledge base-optimized and unoptimized large language models(LLMs)in the field of orthopedics to explore optimization strategies for the application of LLMs in specific fields.Methods This research constructed a specialized knowledge base using clinical guidelines from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons(AAOS)and authoritative orthopedic publications.A total of 30 orthopedic-related questions covering aspects such as anatomical knowledge,disease diagnosis,fracture classification,treatment options,and surgical techniques were input into both the knowledge base-optimized and unoptimized versions of the GPT-4,ChatGLM,and Spark LLM,with their generated responses recorded.The overall quality,accuracy,and comprehensiveness of these responses were evaluated by 3 experienced orthopedic surgeons.Results Compared with their unoptimized LLMs,the optimized version of GPT-4 showed improvements of 15.3%in overall quality,12.5%in accuracy,and 12.8%in comprehensiveness;ChatGLM showed improvements of 24.8%,16.1%,and 19.6%,respectively;and Spark LLM showed improvements of 6.5%,14.5%,and 24.7%,respectively.Conclusion The optimization of knowledge bases significantly enhances the quality,accuracy,and comprehensiveness of the responses provided by the 3 models in the orthopedic field.Therefore,knowledge base optimization is an effective method for improving the performance of LLMs in specific fields.

A large language model-powered literature review for high-angle annular dark field imaging

High-angle annular dark field(HAADF)imaging in scanning transmission electron microscopy(STEM)has become an indispensable tool in materials science due to its ability to offer sub-°A resolution and provide chemical information through Z-contrast.This study leverages large language models(LLMs)to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of a large amount of HAADF-related literature(more than 41000 papers).By using LLMs,specifically ChatGPT,we were able to extract detailed information on applications,sample preparation methods,instruments used,and study conclusions.The findings highlight the capability of LLMs to provide a new perspective into HAADF imaging,underscoring its increasingly important role in materials science.Moreover,the rich information extracted from these publications can be harnessed to develop AI models that enhance the automation and intelligence of electron microscopes.

Large language models in laparoscopic surgery: A transformative opportunity

This opinion paper explores the transformative potential of large language models(LLMs)in laparoscopic surgery and argues for their integration to enhance surgical education,decision support,reporting,and patient care.LLMs can revolutionize surgical education by providing personalized learning experiences and accelerating skill acquisition.Intelligent decision support systems powered by LLMs can assist surgeons in making complex decisions,optimizing surgical workflows,and improving patient outcomes.Moreover,LLMs can automate surgical reporting and generate personalized patient education materials,streamlining documentation and improving patient engagement.However,challenges such as data scarcity,surgical semantic capture,real-time inference,and integration with existing systems need to be addressed for successful LLM integration.The future of laparoscopic surgery lies in the seamless integration of LLMs,enabling autonomous robotic surgery,predictive surgical planning,intraoperative decision support,virtual surgical assistants,and continuous learning.By harnessing the power of LLMs,laparoscopic surgery can be transformed,empowering surgeons and ultimately benefiting patients.

Classification of Conversational Sentences Using an Ensemble Pre-Trained Language Model with the Fine-Tuned Parameter

Sentence classification is the process of categorizing a sentence based on the context of the sentence.Sentence categorization requires more semantic highlights than other tasks,such as dependence parsing,which requires more syntactic elements.Most existing strategies focus on the general semantics of a conversation without involving the context of the sentence,recognizing the progress and comparing impacts.An ensemble pre-trained language model was taken up here to classify the conversation sentences from the conversation corpus.The conversational sentences are classified into four categories:information,question,directive,and commission.These classification label sequences are for analyzing the conversation progress and predicting the pecking order of the conversation.Ensemble of Bidirectional Encoder for Representation of Transformer(BERT),Robustly Optimized BERT pretraining Approach(RoBERTa),Generative Pre-Trained Transformer(GPT),DistilBERT and Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding(XLNet)models are trained on conversation corpus with hyperparameters.Hyperparameter tuning approach is carried out for better performance on sentence classification.This Ensemble of Pre-trained Language Models with a Hyperparameter Tuning(EPLM-HT)system is trained on an annotated conversation dataset.The proposed approach outperformed compared to the base BERT,GPT,DistilBERT and XLNet transformer models.The proposed ensemble model with the fine-tuned parameters achieved an F1_score of 0.88.

Enhancing Relational Triple Extraction in Specific Domains:Semantic Enhancement and Synergy of Large Language Models and Small Pre-Trained Language Models

In the process of constructing domain-specific knowledge graphs,the task of relational triple extraction plays a critical role in transforming unstructured text into structured information.Existing relational triple extraction models facemultiple challenges when processing domain-specific data,including insufficient utilization of semantic interaction information between entities and relations,difficulties in handling challenging samples,and the scarcity of domain-specific datasets.To address these issues,our study introduces three innovative components:Relation semantic enhancement,data augmentation,and a voting strategy,all designed to significantly improve the model’s performance in tackling domain-specific relational triple extraction tasks.We first propose an innovative attention interaction module.This method significantly enhances the semantic interaction capabilities between entities and relations by integrating semantic information fromrelation labels.Second,we propose a voting strategy that effectively combines the strengths of large languagemodels(LLMs)and fine-tuned small pre-trained language models(SLMs)to reevaluate challenging samples,thereby improving the model’s adaptability in specific domains.Additionally,we explore the use of LLMs for data augmentation,aiming to generate domain-specific datasets to alleviate the scarcity of domain data.Experiments conducted on three domain-specific datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing comparative models in several aspects,with F1 scores exceeding the State of the Art models by 2%,1.6%,and 0.6%,respectively,validating the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach.

LKPNR: Large Language Models and Knowledge Graph for Personalized News Recommendation Framework

Accurately recommending candidate news to users is a basic challenge of personalized news recommendation systems.Traditional methods are usually difficult to learn and acquire complex semantic information in news texts,resulting in unsatisfactory recommendation results.Besides,these traditional methods are more friendly to active users with rich historical behaviors.However,they can not effectively solve the long tail problem of inactive users.To address these issues,this research presents a novel general framework that combines Large Language Models(LLM)and Knowledge Graphs(KG)into traditional methods.To learn the contextual information of news text,we use LLMs’powerful text understanding ability to generate news representations with rich semantic information,and then,the generated news representations are used to enhance the news encoding in traditional methods.In addition,multi-hops relationship of news entities is mined and the structural information of news is encoded using KG,thus alleviating the challenge of long-tail distribution.Experimental results demonstrate that compared with various traditional models,on evaluation indicators such as AUC,MRR,nDCG@5 and nDCG@10,the framework significantly improves the recommendation performance.The successful integration of LLM and KG in our framework has established a feasible way for achieving more accurate personalized news recommendation.Our code is available at https://github.com/Xuan-ZW/LKPNR.

Evaluating the role of large language models in inflammatory bowel disease patient information

This letter evaluates the article by Gravina et al on ChatGPT’s potential in providing medical information for inflammatory bowel disease patients.While promising,it highlights the need for advanced techniques like reasoning+action and retrieval-augmented generation to improve accuracy and reliability.Emphasizing that simple question and answer testing is insufficient,it calls for more nuanced evaluation methods to truly gauge large language models’capabilities in clinical applications.

Potential use of large language models for mitigating students’problematic social media use:ChatGPT as an example

The problematic use of social media has numerous negative impacts on individuals'daily lives,interpersonal relationships,physical and mental health,and more.Currently,there are few methods and tools to alleviate problematic social media,and their potential is yet to be fully realized.Emerging large language models(LLMs)are becoming increasingly popular for providing information and assistance to people and are being applied in many aspects of life.In mitigating problematic social media use,LLMs such as ChatGPT can play a positive role by serving as conversational partners and outlets for users,providing personalized information and resources,monitoring and intervening in problematic social media use,and more.In this process,we should recognize both the enormous potential and endless possibilities of LLMs such as ChatGPT,leveraging their advantages to better address problematic social media use,while also acknowledging the limitations and potential pitfalls of ChatGPT technology,such as errors,limitations in issue resolution,privacy and security concerns,and potential overreliance.When we leverage the advantages of LLMs to address issues in social media usage,we must adopt a cautious and ethical approach,being vigilant of the potential adverse effects that LLMs may have in addressing problematic social media use to better harness technology to serve individuals and society.

Evaluating Privacy Leakage and Memorization Attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs) in Generative AI Applications

The recent interest in the deployment of Generative AI applications that use large language models (LLMs) has brought to the forefront significant privacy concerns, notably the leakage of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and other confidential or protected information that may have been memorized during training, specifically during a fine-tuning or customization process. We describe different black-box attacks from potential adversaries and study their impact on the amount and type of information that may be recovered from commonly used and deployed LLMs. Our research investigates the relationship between PII leakage, memorization, and factors such as model size, architecture, and the nature of attacks employed. The study utilizes two broad categories of attacks: PII leakage-focused attacks (auto-completion and extraction attacks) and memorization-focused attacks (various membership inference attacks). The findings from these investigations are quantified using an array of evaluative metrics, providing a detailed understanding of LLM vulnerabilities and the effectiveness of different attacks.

Let’s Talk LGBTQIA+:Strategies and Activities for Teaching Diversity and Inclusion in the Foreign Language Classroom at the College Level

In this presentation,the author explores strategies and activities that create a welcoming and nurturing environment for LGBTQIA+foreign language students at the college level in the United States.Indeed,as it is commonly stated,there is a clear lack of visibility,acceptance/tolerance,and inclusion of LGBTQIA+voices(active and proactive)in foreign language teaching and learning(pedagogical material as well as in-class attitudes and delivery).The reasons for this deficiency are diverse since they cover not only outward discrimination against and/or indifference(passive-aggressive behavior)toward the LGBTQIA+community and its plight,but they also illustrate the sheer,physical inexistence of quality material that can be used to create,present,and foster a welcoming and all-encompassing classroom environment that addresses the diverse spectrum of the LGBTQIA+community while its members try to learn a foreign language and(positively)negotiate how to express their very identity in their new language of choice.Moreover,the scant material that is available in the United States as well as in other Western countries where the LGBTQIA+community by and large is accepted-at least from the legal point of view-hardly represents and covers the subject matter in a satisfactory way.To address this gap,the author will provide some examples in European Portuguese(EP)and Italian(IT),followed by a courtesy translation in English,to illustrate some positive activities and strategies for including LGBTQIA+-related subject matter in the foreign language classroom at the college level.It is his desire that instructors of other foreign languages duplicate in their respective vernaculars the strategies and activities herein presented in order to create a welcoming and safe classroom environment that embraces the LGBTQIA+community as it goes through the enjoyable journey of learning a new language and culture.

Security Vulnerability Analyses of Large Language Models (LLMs) through Extension of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Framework

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tasks, becoming an integral part of various applications in society, including text generation, translation, summarization, and more. However, their widespread usage emphasizes the critical need to enhance their security posture to ensure the integrity and reliability of their outputs and minimize harmful effects. Prompt injections and training data poisoning attacks are two of the most prominent vulnerabilities in LLMs, which could potentially lead to unpredictable and undesirable behaviors, such as biased outputs, misinformation propagation, and even malicious content generation. The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) framework provides a standardized approach to capturing the principal characteristics of vulnerabilities, facilitating a deeper understanding of their severity within the security and AI communities. By extending the current CVSS framework, we generate scores for these vulnerabilities such that organizations can prioritize mitigation efforts, allocate resources effectively, and implement targeted security measures to defend against potential risks.

An Empirical Study on Foreign Language Majors’Needs for Ideological and Political Education Elements in Chinese Universities

The paper takes 2076 undergraduate students majoring in foreign languages from 15 Chinese universities as the research subjects to investigate their demand for ideological and political education elements in foreign language courses.The results show that:(1)Students have high needs for ideological and political education elements in foreign language courses;(2)There are differences in students’needs for ideological and political education elements across different dimensions.Students have higher demand for dimensions such as personal qualities,cultural literacy,moral cultivation,and patriotism,while their demand for dimensions related to constitutional law and political identity is relatively low.Therefore,foreign language majors in Chinese universities should optimize the supply of ideological and political education elements in their courses according to students’needs,and improve the effectiveness of moral education in these courses.

An Empirical Study on Students’Evaluation of Moral Education in Foreign Language Education in China

Students’evaluation of moral education is of great significance for improving the quality of teaching.Through a survey of 2715 undergraduates majoring in foreign languages,this paper analyzes their evaluation of the moral education.Findings show that students speak highly of teachers’competence in moral education,teaching methods and the integration of moral education in the textbooks,but not in the course assessment and the overall effect of moral education.Suggestions were proposed accordingly to improve moral education of foreign language education in China.

Smaller & Smarter: Score-Driven Network Chaining of Smaller Language Models

With the continuous evolution and expanding applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been a noticeable surge in the size of the emerging models. It is not solely the growth in model size, primarily measured by the number of parameters, but also the subsequent escalation in computational demands, hardware and software prerequisites for training, all culminating in a substantial financial investment as well. In this paper, we present novel techniques like supervision, parallelization, and scoring functions to get better results out of chains of smaller language models, rather than relying solely on scaling up model size. Firstly, we propose an approach to quantify the performance of a Smaller Language Models (SLM) by introducing a corresponding supervisor model that incrementally corrects the encountered errors. Secondly, we propose an approach to utilize two smaller language models (in a network) performing the same task and retrieving the best relevant output from the two, ensuring peak performance for a specific task. Experimental evaluations establish the quantitative accuracy improvements on financial reasoning and arithmetic calculation tasks from utilizing techniques like supervisor models (in a network of model scenario), threshold scoring and parallel processing over a baseline study.

Large Language Model Based Semantic Parsing for Intelligent Database Query Engine

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation. These models have great potential to enhance database query systems, enabling more intuitive and semantic query mechanisms. Our model leverages LLM’s deep learning architecture to interpret and process natural language queries and translate them into accurate database queries. The system integrates an LLM-powered semantic parser that translates user input into structured queries that can be understood by the database management system. First, the user query is pre-processed, the text is normalized, and the ambiguity is removed. This is followed by semantic parsing, where the LLM interprets the pre-processed text and identifies key entities and relationships. This is followed by query generation, which converts the parsed information into a structured query format and tailors it to the target database schema. Finally, there is query execution and feedback, where the resulting query is executed on the database and the results are returned to the user. The system also provides feedback mechanisms to improve and optimize future query interpretations. By using advanced LLMs for model implementation and fine-tuning on diverse datasets, the experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy and usability of database queries, making data retrieval easy for users without specialized knowledge.

Research on Foreign Language Talent Cultivation Mode Based on the Concept of Language Security

Language security is an important part of national security,and in the current complex international environment,the issue of language security is becoming more and more prominent and has become an unignorable part of national security strategy.As the bridge and link of international communication,foreign language talents’language skills and the level of national security awareness directly affect our country’s international image and the effect of international communication.Therefore,the establishment of a foreign language talent cultivation mode based on the concept of language security is not only an important way to improve the quality of foreign language education but also a realistic need to safeguard national security and promote international exchanges.Starting from the influence of the language security concept on foreign language talent cultivation,this paper analyzes the foreign language talent cultivation mode based on the language security concept,with a view to providing new ideas and methods for the development of foreign language education.

Research Nexus and Implications of Learner Identity in Foreign Language Education

One of the most obvious markers of an individual’s identity is their language.However,in some ways,the relationship between identity and language acquisition seems to be missed.In fact,a lot of studies have shown that identity may influence the reasons behind language acquisition,especially in bilingual or multilingual societies.Learning English can provide EFL(English as a Foreign Language)students with a good sense of identity and encourage them to practice their agency,which can improve learning efficiency and effectiveness.This paper examines how the efficacy and results of language learning are influenced by the learner’s identity.