Mark Core

Basem Rizk, Joel Walsh, Mark Core et al.

Analysis of multi-modal content can be tricky, computationally expensive, and require a significant amount of engineering efforts. Lots of work with pre-trained models on static data is out there, yet fusing these opensource models and methods with complex data such as videos is relatively challenging. In this paper, we present a framework that enables efficiently prototyping pipelines for multi-modal content analysis. We craft a candidate recipe for a pipeline, marrying a set of pre-trained models, to convert videos into a temporal semi-structured data format. We translate this structure further to a frame-level indexed knowledge graph representation that is query-able and supports continual learning, enabling the dynamic incorporation of new domain-specific knowledge through an interactive medium.

Joel Walsh, Siddarth Mamidanna, Benjamin Nye et al.

Research to improve Automated Short Answer Grading has recently focused on Large Language Models (LLMs) with prompt engineering and no- or few-shot prompting to achieve best results. This is in contrast to the fine-tuning approach, which has historically required large-scale compute clusters inaccessible to most users. New closed-model approaches such as OpenAI's fine-tuning service promise results with as few as 100 examples, while methods using open weights such as quantized low-rank adaptive (QLORA) can be used to fine-tune models on consumer GPUs. We evaluate both of these fine-tuning methods, measuring their interaction with few-shot prompting for automated short answer grading (ASAG) with structured (JSON) outputs. Our results show that finetuning with small amounts of data has limited utility for Llama open-weight models, but that fine-tuning methods can outperform few-shot baseline instruction-tuned LLMs for OpenAI's closed models. While our evaluation set is limited, we find some evidence that the observed benefits of finetuning may be impacted by the domain subject matter. Lastly, we observed dramatic improvement with the LLama 3.1 8B-Instruct open-weight model by seeding the initial training examples with a significant amount of cheaply generated synthetic training data.