Step-Back Profiling: Distilling User History for Personalized Scientific WritingXiangru Tang, Xingyao Zhang, Yanjun Shao et al.
Large language models (LLM) excel at a variety of natural language processing tasks, yet they struggle to generate personalized content for individuals, particularly in real-world scenarios like scientific writing. Addressing this challenge, we introduce STEP-BACK PROFILING to personalize LLMs by distilling user history into concise profiles, including essential traits and preferences of users. To conduct the experiments, we construct a Personalized Scientific Writing (PSW) dataset to study multi-user personalization. PSW requires the models to write scientific papers given specialized author groups with diverse academic backgrounds. As for the results, we demonstrate the effectiveness of capturing user characteristics via STEP-BACK PROFILING for collaborative writing. Moreover, our approach outperforms the baselines by up to 3.6 points on the general personalization benchmark (LaMP), including 7 personalization LLM tasks. Our ablation studies validate the contributions of different components in our method and provide insights into our task definition. Our dataset and code are available at \url{https://github.com/gersteinlab/step-back-profiling}.
PRESTO: Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry OutcomesHe Cao, Yanjun Shao, Zhiyuan Liu et al.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have seen growing adoption across various scientific disciplines. These advancements encourage the investigation of molecule-text modeling within synthetic chemistry, a field dedicated to designing and conducting chemical reactions to synthesize new compounds with desired properties and applications. Current approaches, however, often neglect the critical role of multiple molecule graph interaction in understanding chemical reactions, leading to suboptimal performance in synthetic chemistry tasks. This study introduces PRESTO(Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry Outcomes), a new framework that bridges the molecule-text modality gap by integrating a comprehensive benchmark of pretraining strategies and dataset configurations. It progressively improves multimodal LLMs through cross-modal alignment and multi-graph understanding. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that PRESTO offers competitive results in downstream synthetic chemistry tasks. The code can be found at https://github.com/IDEA-XL/PRESTO.