Huan Zhang

Usman Syed, Ethan Light, Xingang Guo et al.

In this paper, we explore the capabilities of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Llama 3, and Llama 3.1 in solving some selected undergraduate-level transportation engineering problems. We introduce TransportBench, a benchmark dataset that includes a sample of transportation engineering problems on a wide range of subjects in the context of planning, design, management, and control of transportation systems. This dataset is used by human experts to evaluate the capabilities of various commercial and open-sourced LLMs, especially their accuracy, consistency, and reasoning behaviors, in solving transportation engineering problems. Our comprehensive analysis uncovers the unique strengths and limitations of each LLM, e.g. our analysis shows the impressive accuracy and some unexpected inconsistent behaviors of Claude 3.5 Sonnet in solving TransportBench problems. Our study marks a thrilling first step toward harnessing artificial general intelligence for complex transportation challenges.

Yujia Huang, Ivan Dario Jimenez Rodriguez, Huan Zhang et al.

Forward invariance is a long-studied property in control theory that is used to certify that a dynamical system stays within some pre-specified set of states for all time, and also admits robustness guarantees (e.g., the certificate holds under perturbations). We propose a general framework for training and provably certifying robust forward invariance in Neural ODEs. We apply this framework to provide certified safety in robust continuous control. To our knowledge, this is the first instance of training Neural ODE policies with such non-vacuous certified guarantees. In addition, we explore the generality of our framework by using it to certify adversarial robustness for image classification.

Yifan Sun, Han Wang, Dongbai Li et al.

Benchmark Data Contamination (BDC)-the inclusion of benchmark testing samples in the training set-has raised increasing concerns in Large Language Model (LLM) evaluation, leading to falsely inflated performance estimates and undermining evaluation reliability. To address this, researchers have proposed various mitigation strategies to update existing benchmarks, including modifying original questions or generating new ones based on them. However, a rigorous examination of the effectiveness of these mitigation strategies remains lacking. In this paper, we design a systematic and controlled pipeline along with two novel metrics-fidelity and contamination resistance-to provide a fine-grained and comprehensive assessment of existing BDC mitigation strategies. Previous assessment methods, such as accuracy drop and accuracy matching, focus solely on aggregate accuracy, often leading to incomplete or misleading conclusions. Our metrics address this limitation by emphasizing question-level evaluation result matching. Extensive experiments with 10 LLMs, 5 benchmarks, 20 BDC mitigation strategies, and 2 contamination scenarios reveal that no existing strategy significantly improves resistance over the vanilla case (i.e., no benchmark update) across all benchmarks, and none effectively balances fidelity and contamination resistance. These findings underscore the urgent need for designing more effective BDC mitigation strategies. Our code repository is available at https://github.com/ASTRAL-Group/BDC_mitigation_assessment.