Recent advances in long-context language models (LCLMs), designed to handle extremely long contexts, primarily focus on utilizing external contextual information, often leaving the influence of language models' parametric knowledge underexplored. In this work, we firstly investigate how this parametric knowledge affects content generation and demonstrate that its impact becomes increasingly pronounced as context length extends. Furthermore, we show that the model’s ability to utilize parametric knowledge, which we call parametric recall ability, does not improve simultaneously with its ability to leverage contextual knowledge through extrinsic retrieval ability. Moreover, better extrinsic retrieval ability can interfere with the model’s parametric recall ability, limiting its full potential. To bridge this gap, we design a simple yet effective Hybrid Needle-in-a-Haystack test that evaluates models based on their capabilities across both abilities, rather than solely emphasizing extrinsic retrieval ability. Our experimental results reveal that Qwen-2.5 models significantly outperform Llama-3.1 models, demonstrating superior potential to combine various abilities. Moreover, even the more powerful Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct model fails to exhibit better performance, highlighting the importance of evaluating models from a dual-ability perspective.

Local railway committees need timely situational awareness after highway–rail grade crossing incidents, yet official Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) investigations can take days to weeks. We present a demo system that populates Highway–Rail Grade Crossing Incident Data (Form 57) from news in real time. Our approach addresses two core challenges: the form is visually irregular and semantically dense, and news is noisy. To solve these problems, we design a pipeline that first converts Form 57 into a JSON schema using a vision language model with sample aggregation, and then performs grouped question answering following the intent of the form layout to reduce ambiguity. In addition, we build an evaluation dataset by aligning scraped news articles with official FRA records and annotating retrievable information. We then assess our system against various alternatives in terms of information retrieval accuracy and coverage.

Each new generation of English-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibits enhanced cross-lingual transfer capabilities and significantly outperforms older LLMs on low-resource languages. This prompts the question: Is there a need for LLMs dedicated to a particular low-resource language? We aim to explore this question for Bengali, a low-to-moderate resource Indo-Aryan language native to the Bengal region of South Asia. We compare the performance of open-weight and closed-source LLMs such as LLaMA-3 and GPT-4 against fine-tuned encoder-decoder models across a diverse set of Bengali downstream tasks, including translation, summarization, paraphrasing, question-answering, and natural language inference. Our findings reveal that while LLMs generally excel in reasoning tasks, their performance in tasks requiring Bengali script generation is inconsistent. Key challenges include inefficient tokenization of Bengali script by existing LLMs, leading to increased computational costs and potential performance degradation. Additionally, we highlight biases in machine-translated datasets commonly used for Bengali NLP tasks. We conclude that there is a significant need for a Bengali-oriented LLM, but the field currently lacks the high-quality pretraining and instruction-tuning datasets necessary to develop a highly effective model.

Given natural language test case description for an Android application, existing testing approaches require developers to manually write scripts using tools such as Appium and Espresso to execute the corresponding test case. This process is labor-intensive and demands significant effort to maintain as UI interfaces evolve throughout development. In this work, we introduce LELANTE, a novel framework that utilizes large language models (LLMs) to automate test case execution without requiring pre-written scripts. LELANTE interprets natural language test case descriptions, iteratively generate action plans, and perform the actions directly on the Android screen using its GUI. LELANTE employs a screen refinement process to enhance LLM interpretability, constructs a structured prompt for LLMs, and implements an action generation mechanism based on chain-of-thought reasoning of LLMs. To further reduce computational cost and enhance scalability, LELANTE utilizes model distillation using a foundational LLM. In experiments across 390 test cases spanning 10 popular Android applications, LELANTE achieved a 73% test execution success rate. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can effectively bridge the gap between natural language test case description and automated execution, making mobile testing more scalable and adaptable.

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) scan yields all possible cross-section images of a retina for detecting biomarkers linked to optical defects. Due to the high volume of data generated, an automated and reliable biomarker detection pipeline is necessary as a primary screening stage.We outline our new state-of-the-art pipeline for identifying biomarkers from OCT scans. In collaboration with trained ophthalmologists, we identify local and global structures in biomarkers. Through a comprehensive and systematic review of existing vision architectures, we evaluate different convolution and attention mechanisms for biomarker detection. We find that MaxViT, a hybrid vision transformer combining convolution layers with strided attention, is better suited for local feature detection, while EVA-02, a standard vision transformer leveraging pure attention and large-scale knowledge distillation, excels at capturing global features. We ensemble the predictions of both models to achieve first place in the IEEE Video and Image Processing Cup 2023 competition on OCT biomarker detection, achieving a patient-wise F1 score of 0.8527 in the final phase of the competition, scoring 3.8% higher than the next best solution. Finally, we used knowledge distillation to train a single MaxViT to outperform our ensemble at a fraction of the computation cost.