new Nash CoT: Multi-Path Inference with Preference Equilibrium

Authors: Ziqi Zhang, Cunxiang Wang, Xiong Xiao, Yue Zhang, Donglin Wang

Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex problems. Among CoT-related studies, self-consistency (Multi-path inference with answer filtering through voting) involves generating multiple reasoning paths using the CoT framework and then selecting the most frequently produced outputs standing out as a concise yet competitive approach. While self-consistency has indeed led to the improvements in LLM inference, the use of multi-path inference also escalates deployment costs. Therefore, maintaining the performance benefits of self-consistency inherited from multi-path inference while reducing the inference costs holds significant value. In this research, we conceptualize language decoding as a preference consensus game, constructing a bi-player gaming system within each local path, and introduce Nash Chain-of-Thought (Nash CoT). Specifically, for a given question, we leverage LLM to autonomously select the contextually relevant template and generate outputs guided by this template, aiming to reach Nash Equilibrium alongside normal generation in each path. This approach allows us to achieve comparable or improved performance compared to self-consistency while using fewer inference paths on various inference tasks, including Arabic reasoning, Commonsense Question answering, and Symbolic inference.

new Identification of emotions on Twitter during the 2022 electoral process in Colombia

Authors: Juan Jose Iguaran Fernandez, Juan Manuel Perez, German Rosati

Abstract: The study of Twitter as a means for analyzing social phenomena has gained interest in recent years due to the availability of large amounts of data in a relatively spontaneous environment. Within opinion-mining tasks, emotion detection is specially relevant, as it allows for the identification of people's subjective responses to different social events in a more granular way than traditional sentiment analysis based on polarity. In the particular case of political events, the analysis of emotions in social networks can provide valuable information on the perception of candidates, proposals, and other important aspects of the public debate. In spite of this importance, there are few studies on emotion detection in Spanish and, to the best of our knowledge, few resources are public for opinion mining in Colombian Spanish, highlighting the need for generating resources addressing the specific cultural characteristics of this variety. In this work, we present a small corpus of tweets in Spanish related to the 2022 Colombian presidential elections, manually labeled with emotions using a fine-grained taxonomy. We perform classification experiments using supervised state-of-the-art models (BERT models) and compare them with GPT-3.5 in few-shot learning settings. We make our dataset and code publicly available for research purposes.

new Reuse, Don't Retrain: A Recipe for Continued Pretraining of Language Models

Authors: Jupinder Parmar, Sanjev Satheesh, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: As language models have scaled both their number of parameters and pretraining dataset sizes, the computational cost for pretraining has become intractable except for the most well-resourced teams. This increasing cost makes it ever more important to be able to reuse a model after it has completed pretraining; allowing for a model's abilities to further improve without needing to train from scratch. In this work, we detail a set of guidelines that cover how to design efficacious data distributions and learning rate schedules for continued pretraining of language models. When applying these findings within a continued pretraining run on top of a well-trained 15B parameter model, we show an improvement of 9\% in average model accuracy compared to the baseline of continued training on the pretraining set. The resulting recipe provides a practical starting point with which to begin developing language models through reuse rather than retraining.

new ESM+: Modern Insights into Perspective on Text-to-SQL Evaluation in the Age of Large Language Models

Authors: Benjamin Ascoli, Ram Kandikonda, Jinho D. Choi

Abstract: The task of Text-to-SQL enables anyone to retrieve information from SQL databases using natural language. Despite several challenges, recent models have made remarkable advancements in this task using large language models (LLMs). Interestingly, we find that LLM-based models without fine-tuning exhibit distinct natures compared to their fine-tuned counterparts, leading to inadequacies in current evaluation metrics to accurately convey their performance. Thus, we analyze the two primary metrics, Test Suite Execution Accuracy (EXE) and Exact Set Matching Accuracy (ESM), to examine their robustness for this task and address shortcomings. We compare the performance of 9 LLM-based models using EXE, the original ESM, and our improved ESM (called ESM+). Our results show that EXE and ESM have high false positive and negative rates of 11.3% and 13.9%, while ESM+ gives those of 0.1% and 2.6% respectively, providing a significantly more stable evaluation. We release the ESM+ script as open-source for the community to contribute, while enjoying a more reliable assessment of Text-to-SQL.

new RAG vs. Long Context: Examining Frontier Large Language Models for Environmental Review Document Comprehension

Authors: Hung Phan, Anurag Acharya, Sarthak Chaturvedi, Shivam Sharma, Mike Parker, Dan Nally, Ali Jannesari, Karl Pazdernik, Mahantesh Halappanavar, Sai Munikoti, Sameera Horawalavithana

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied to many research problems across various domains. One of the applications of LLMs is providing question-answering systems that cater to users from different fields. The effectiveness of LLM-based question-answering systems has already been established at an acceptable level for users posing questions in popular and public domains such as trivia and literature. However, it has not often been established in niche domains that traditionally require specialized expertise. To this end, we construct the NEPAQuAD1.0 benchmark to evaluate the performance of three frontier LLMs -- Claude Sonnet, Gemini, and GPT-4 -- when answering questions originating from Environmental Impact Statements prepared by U.S. federal government agencies in accordance with the National Environmental Environmental Act (NEPA). We specifically measure the ability of LLMs to understand the nuances of legal, technical, and compliance-related information present in NEPA documents in different contextual scenarios. For example, we test the LLMs' internal prior NEPA knowledge by providing questions without any context, as well as assess how LLMs synthesize the contextual information present in long NEPA documents to facilitate the question/answering task. We compare the performance of the long context LLMs and RAG powered models in handling different types of questions (e.g., problem-solving, divergent). Our results suggest that RAG powered models significantly outperform the long context models in the answer accuracy regardless of the choice of the frontier LLM. Our further analysis reveals that many models perform better answering closed questions than divergent and problem-solving questions.

new Probability of Differentiation Reveals Brittleness of Homogeneity Bias in Large Language Models

Authors: Messi H. J. Lee, Calvin K. Lai

Abstract: Homogeneity bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) refers to their tendency to homogenize the representations of some groups compared to others. Previous studies documenting this bias have predominantly used encoder models, which may have inadvertently introduced biases. To address this limitation, we prompted GPT-4 to generate single word/expression completions associated with 18 situation cues - specific, measurable elements of environments that influence how individuals perceive situations and compared the variability of these completions using probability of differentiation. This approach directly assessed homogeneity bias from the model's outputs, bypassing encoder models. Across five studies, we find that homogeneity bias is highly volatile across situation cues and writing prompts, suggesting that the bias observed in past work may reflect those within encoder models rather than LLMs. Furthermore, these results suggest that homogeneity bias in LLMs is brittle, as even minor and arbitrary changes in prompts can significantly alter the expression of biases. Future work should further explore how variations in syntactic features and topic choices in longer text generations influence homogeneity bias in LLMs.

new Interpretable Differential Diagnosis with Dual-Inference Large Language Models

Authors: Shuang Zhou, Sirui Ding, Jiashuo Wang, Mingquan Lin, Genevieve B. Melton, Rui Zhang

Abstract: Methodological advancements to automate the generation of differential diagnosis (DDx) to predict a list of potential diseases as differentials given patients' symptom descriptions are critical to clinical reasoning and applications such as decision support. However, providing reasoning or interpretation for these differential diagnoses is more meaningful. Fortunately, large language models (LLMs) possess powerful language processing abilities and have been proven effective in various related tasks. Motivated by this potential, we investigate the use of LLMs for interpretable DDx. First, we develop a new DDx dataset with expert-derived interpretation on 570 public clinical notes. Second, we propose a novel framework, named Dual-Inf, that enables LLMs to conduct bidirectional inference for interpretation. Both human and automated evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of Dual-Inf in predicting differentials and diagnosis explanations. Specifically, the performance improvement of Dual-Inf over the baseline methods exceeds 32% w.r.t. BERTScore in DDx interpretation. Furthermore, experiments verify that Dual-Inf (1) makes fewer errors in interpretation, (2) has great generalizability, (3) is promising for rare disease diagnosis and explanation.

new MixSumm: Topic-based Data Augmentation using LLMs for Low-resource Extractive Text Summarization

Authors: Gaurav Sahu, Issam H. Laradji

Abstract: Low-resource extractive text summarization is a vital but heavily underexplored area of research. Prior literature either focuses on abstractive text summarization or prompts a large language model (LLM) like GPT-3 directly to generate summaries. In this work, we propose MixSumm for low-resource extractive text summarization. Specifically, MixSumm prompts an open-source LLM, LLaMA-3-70b, to generate documents that mix information from multiple topics as opposed to generating documents without mixup, and then trains a summarization model on the generated dataset. We use ROUGE scores and L-Eval, a reference-free LLaMA-3-based evaluation method to measure the quality of generated summaries. We conduct extensive experiments on a challenging text summarization benchmark comprising the TweetSumm, WikiHow, and ArXiv/PubMed datasets and show that our LLM-based data augmentation framework outperforms recent prompt-based approaches for low-resource extractive summarization. Additionally, our results also demonstrate effective knowledge distillation from LLaMA-3-70b to a small BERT-based extractive summarizer.

new Multilingual Blending: LLM Safety Alignment Evaluation with Language Mixture

Authors: Jiayang Song, Yuheng Huang, Zhehua Zhou, Lei Ma

Abstract: As safety remains a crucial concern throughout the development lifecycle of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers and industrial practitioners have increasingly focused on safeguarding and aligning LLM behaviors with human preferences and ethical standards. LLMs, trained on extensive multilingual corpora, exhibit powerful generalization abilities across diverse languages and domains. However, current safety alignment practices predominantly focus on single-language scenarios, which leaves their effectiveness in complex multilingual contexts, especially for those complex mixed-language formats, largely unexplored. In this study, we introduce Multilingual Blending, a mixed-language query-response scheme designed to evaluate the safety alignment of various state-of-the-art LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, GPT-3.5, Llama3) under sophisticated, multilingual conditions. We further investigate language patterns such as language availability, morphology, and language family that could impact the effectiveness of Multilingual Blending in compromising the safeguards of LLMs. Our experimental results show that, without meticulously crafted prompt templates, Multilingual Blending significantly amplifies the detriment of malicious queries, leading to dramatically increased bypass rates in LLM safety alignment (67.23% on GPT-3.5 and 40.34% on GPT-4o), far exceeding those of single-language baselines. Moreover, the performance of Multilingual Blending varies notably based on intrinsic linguistic properties, with languages of different morphology and from diverse families being more prone to evading safety alignments. These findings underscore the necessity of evaluating LLMs and developing corresponding safety alignment strategies in a complex, multilingual context to align with their superior cross-language generalization capabilities.

new LokiLM: Technical Report

Authors: Justin Kiefel, Shrey Shah

Abstract: In this work, we introduce LokiLM, a 1.4B parameter large language model trained on 500B tokens. Our model performs strongly in natural language reasoning tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance among models with 1.5B parameters or less. LokiLM is trained using multi-teacher knowledge distillation and high-quality training data to achieve benchmark results competitive with larger models trained on significantly more tokens. We support these findings by introducing steps to avoid benchmark contamination and overfitting throughout our development process. Despite its promising performance, LokiLM exhibits a concerning amount of hallucinations and scores poorly on the TruthfulQA benchmark, so we do not release the model publicly.

new Automatic Extraction of Disease Risk Factors from Medical Publications

Authors: Maxim Rubchinsky, Ella Rabinovich, Adi Shraibman, Netanel Golan, Tali Sahar, Dorit Shweiki

Abstract: We present a novel approach to automating the identification of risk factors for diseases from medical literature, leveraging pre-trained models in the bio-medical domain, while tuning them for the specific task. Faced with the challenges of the diverse and unstructured nature of medical articles, our study introduces a multi-step system to first identify relevant articles, then classify them based on the presence of risk factor discussions and, finally, extract specific risk factor information for a disease through a question-answering model. Our contributions include the development of a comprehensive pipeline for the automated extraction of risk factors and the compilation of several datasets, which can serve as valuable resources for further research in this area. These datasets encompass a wide range of diseases, as well as their associated risk factors, meticulously identified and validated through a fine-grained evaluation scheme. We conducted both automatic and thorough manual evaluation, demonstrating encouraging results. We also highlight the importance of improving models and expanding dataset comprehensiveness to keep pace with the rapidly evolving field of medical research.

new KpopMT: Translation Dataset with Terminology for Kpop Fandom

Authors: JiWoo Kim, Yunsu Kim, JinYeong Bak

Abstract: While machines learn from existing corpora, humans have the unique capability to establish and accept new language systems. This makes human form unique language systems within social groups. Aligning with this, we focus on a gap remaining in addressing translation challenges within social groups, where in-group members utilize unique terminologies. We propose KpopMT dataset, which aims to fill this gap by enabling precise terminology translation, choosing Kpop fandom as an initiative for social groups given its global popularity. Expert translators provide 1k English translations for Korean posts and comments, each annotated with specific terminology within social groups' language systems. We evaluate existing translation systems including GPT models on KpopMT to identify their failure cases. Results show overall low scores, underscoring the challenges of reflecting group-specific terminologies and styles in translation. We make KpopMT publicly available.

new Out-of-distribution generalisation in spoken language understanding

Authors: Dejan Porjazovski, Anssi Moisio, Mikko Kurimo

Abstract: Test data is said to be out-of-distribution (OOD) when it unexpectedly differs from the training data, a common challenge in real-world use cases of machine learning. Although OOD generalisation has gained interest in recent years, few works have focused on OOD generalisation in spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks. To facilitate research on this topic, we introduce a modified version of the popular SLU dataset SLURP, featuring data splits for testing OOD generalisation in the SLU task. We call our modified dataset SLURP For OOD generalisation, or SLURPFOOD. Utilising our OOD data splits, we find end-to-end SLU models to have limited capacity for generalisation. Furthermore, by employing model interpretability techniques, we shed light on the factors contributing to the generalisation difficulties of the models. To improve the generalisation, we experiment with two techniques, which improve the results on some, but not all the splits, emphasising the need for new techniques.

new Review-LLM: Harnessing Large Language Models for Personalized Review Generation

Authors: Qiyao Peng, Hongtao Liu, Hongyan Xu, Qing Yang, Minglai Shao, Wenjun Wang

Abstract: Product review generation is an important task in recommender systems, which could provide explanation and persuasiveness for the recommendation. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT) have shown superior text modeling and generating ability, which could be applied in review generation. However, directly applying the LLMs for generating reviews might be troubled by the ``polite'' phenomenon of the LLMs and could not generate personalized reviews (e.g., negative reviews). In this paper, we propose Review-LLM that customizes LLMs for personalized review generation. Firstly, we construct the prompt input by aggregating user historical behaviors, which include corresponding item titles and reviews. This enables the LLMs to capture user interest features and review writing style. Secondly, we incorporate ratings as indicators of satisfaction into the prompt, which could further improve the model's understanding of user preferences and the sentiment tendency control of generated reviews. Finally, we feed the prompt text into LLMs, and use Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to make the model generate personalized reviews for the given user and target item. Experimental results on the real-world dataset show that our fine-tuned model could achieve better review generation performance than existing close-source LLMs.

new Bucket Pre-training is All You Need

Authors: Hongtao Liu, Qiyao Peng, Qing Yang, Kai Liu, Hongyan Xu

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various natural language processing tasks. However, the conventional fixed-length data composition strategy for pretraining, which involves concatenating and splitting documents, can introduce noise and limit the model's ability to capture long-range dependencies. To address this, we first introduce three metrics for evaluating data composition quality: padding ratio, truncation ratio, and concatenation ratio. We further propose a multi-bucket data composition method that moves beyond the fixed-length paradigm, offering a more flexible and efficient approach to pretraining. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method could significantly improving both the efficiency and efficacy of LLMs pretraining. Our approach not only reduces noise and preserves context but also accelerates training, making it a promising solution for LLMs pretraining.

new Beyond Benchmarking: A New Paradigm for Evaluation and Assessment of Large Language Models

Authors: Jin Liu, Qingquan Li, Wenlong Du

Abstract: In current benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs), there are issues such as evaluation content restriction, untimely updates, and lack of optimization guidance. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for the measurement of LLMs: Benchmarking-Evaluation-Assessment. Our paradigm shifts the "location" of LLM evaluation from the "examination room" to the "hospital". Through conducting a "physical examination" on LLMs, it utilizes specific task-solving as the evaluation content, performs deep attribution of existing problems within LLMs, and provides recommendation for optimization.

new Arabic Automatic Story Generation with Large Language Models

Authors: Ahmed Oumar El-Shangiti, Fakhraddin Alwajih, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for a wide range of language generation tasks. Nevertheless, this progress has been slower in Arabic. In this work, we focus on the task of generating stories from LLMs. For our training, we use stories acquired through machine translation (MT) as well as GPT-4. For the MT data, we develop a careful pipeline that ensures we acquire high-quality stories. For our GPT-41 data, we introduce crafted prompts that allow us to generate data well-suited to the Arabic context in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and two Arabic dialects (Egyptian and Moroccan). For example, we generate stories tailored to various Arab countries on a wide host of topics. Our manual evaluation shows that our model fine-tuned on these training datasets can generate coherent stories that adhere to our instructions. We also conduct an extensive automatic and human evaluation comparing our models against state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models. Our datasets and models will be made publicly available at https: //github.com/UBC-NLP/arastories.

new On Leakage of Code Generation Evaluation Datasets

Authors: Alexandre Matton, Tom Sherborne, Dennis Aumiller, Elena Tommasone, Milad Alizadeh, Jingyi He, Raymond Ma, Maxime Voisin, Ellen Gilsenan-McMahon, Matthias Gall\'e

Abstract: In this paper we consider contamination by code generation test sets, in particular in their use in modern large language models. We discuss three possible sources of such contamination and show findings supporting each of them: (i) direct data leakage, (ii) indirect data leakage through the use of synthetic data and (iii) overfitting to evaluation sets during model selection. Key to our findings is a new dataset of 161 prompts with their associated python solutions, dataset which is released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/CohereForAI/lbpp .

URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/CohereForAI/lbpp

new HebDB: a Weakly Supervised Dataset for Hebrew Speech Processing

Authors: Arnon Turetzky, Or Tal, Yael Segal-Feldman, Yehoshua Dissen, Ella Zeldes, Amit Roth, Eyal Cohen, Yosi Shrem, Bronya R. Chernyak, Olga Seleznova, Joseph Keshet, Yossi Adi

Abstract: We present HebDB, a weakly supervised dataset for spoken language processing in the Hebrew language. HebDB offers roughly 2500 hours of natural and spontaneous speech recordings in the Hebrew language, consisting of a large variety of speakers and topics. We provide raw recordings together with a pre-processed, weakly supervised, and filtered version. The goal of HebDB is to further enhance research and development of spoken language processing tools for the Hebrew language. Hence, we additionally provide two baseline systems for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR): (i) a self-supervised model; and (ii) a fully supervised model. We present the performance of these two methods optimized on HebDB and compare them to current multi-lingual ASR alternatives. Results suggest the proposed method reaches better results than the evaluated baselines considering similar model sizes. Dataset, code, and models are publicly available under https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/HebDB/.

URLs: https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/HebDB/.

new The Computational Learning of Construction Grammars: State of the Art and Prospective Roadmap

Authors: Jonas Doumen, Veronica Juliana Schmalz, Katrien Beuls, Paul Van Eecke

Abstract: This paper documents and reviews the state of the art concerning computational models of construction grammar learning. It brings together prior work on the computational learning of form-meaning pairings, which has so far been studied in several distinct areas of research. The goal of this paper is threefold. First of all, it aims to synthesise the variety of methodologies that have been proposed to date and the results that have been obtained. Second, it aims to identify those parts of the challenge that have been successfully tackled and reveal those that require further research. Finally, it aims to provide a roadmap which can help to boost and streamline future research efforts on the computational learning of large-scale, usage-based construction grammars.

new Psycho-linguistic Experiment on Universal Semantic Components of Verbal Humor: System Description and Annotation

Authors: Elena Mikhalkova, Nadezhda Ganzherli, Julia Murzina

Abstract: Objective criteria for universal semantic components that distinguish a humorous utterance from a non-humorous one are presently under debate. In this article, we give an in-depth observation of our system of self-paced reading for annotation of humor, that collects readers' annotations while they open a text word by word. The system registers keys that readers press to open the next word, choose a class (humorous versus non-humorous texts), change their choice. We also touch upon our psycho-linguistic experiment conducted with the system and the data collected during it.

new A Review of the Challenges with Massive Web-mined Corpora Used in Large Language Models Pre-Training

Authors: Micha{\l} Pere{\l}kiewicz, Rafa{\l} Po\'swiata

Abstract: This article presents a comprehensive review of the challenges associated with using massive web-mined corpora for the pre-training of large language models (LLMs). This review identifies key challenges in this domain, including challenges such as noise (irrelevant or misleading information), duplication of content, the presence of low-quality or incorrect information, biases, and the inclusion of sensitive or personal information in web-mined corpora. Addressing these issues is crucial for the development of accurate, reliable, and ethically responsible language models. Through an examination of current methodologies for data cleaning, pre-processing, bias detection and mitigation, we highlight the gaps in existing approaches and suggest directions for future research. Our discussion aims to catalyze advancements in developing more sophisticated and ethically responsible LLMs.

new A Proposed S.C.O.R.E. Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models : Safety, Consensus, Objectivity, Reproducibility and Explainability

Authors: Ting Fang Tan, Kabilan Elangovan, Jasmine Ong, Nigam Shah, Joseph Sung, Tien Yin Wong, Lan Xue, Nan Liu, Haibo Wang, Chang Fu Kuo, Simon Chesterman, Zee Kin Yeong, Daniel SW Ting

Abstract: A comprehensive qualitative evaluation framework for large language models (LLM) in healthcare that expands beyond traditional accuracy and quantitative metrics needed. We propose 5 key aspects for evaluation of LLMs: Safety, Consensus, Objectivity, Reproducibility and Explainability (S.C.O.R.E.). We suggest that S.C.O.R.E. may form the basis for an evaluation framework for future LLM-based models that are safe, reliable, trustworthy, and ethical for healthcare and clinical applications.

new Multi-task Prompt Words Learning for Social Media Content Generation

Authors: Haochen Xue, Chong Zhang, Chengzhi Liu, Fangyu Wu, Xiaobo Jin

Abstract: The rapid development of the Internet has profoundly changed human life. Humans are increasingly expressing themselves and interacting with others on social media platforms. However, although artificial intelligence technology has been widely used in many aspects of life, its application in social media content creation is still blank. To solve this problem, we propose a new prompt word generation framework based on multi-modal information fusion, which combines multiple tasks including topic classification, sentiment analysis, scene recognition and keyword extraction to generate more comprehensive prompt words. Subsequently, we use a template containing a set of prompt words to guide ChatGPT to generate high-quality tweets. Furthermore, in the absence of effective and objective evaluation criteria in the field of content generation, we use the ChatGPT tool to evaluate the results generated by the algorithm, making large-scale evaluation of content generation algorithms possible. Evaluation results on extensive content generation demonstrate that our cue word generation framework generates higher quality content compared to manual methods and other cueing techniques, while topic classification, sentiment analysis, and scene recognition significantly enhance content clarity and its consistency with the image.

new WorldAPIs: The World Is Worth How Many APIs? A Thought Experiment

Authors: Jiefu Ou, Arda Uzunoglu, Benjamin Van Durme, Daniel Khashabi

Abstract: AI systems make decisions in physical environments through primitive actions or affordances that are accessed via API calls. While deploying AI agents in the real world involves numerous high-level actions, existing embodied simulators offer a limited set of domain-salient APIs. This naturally brings up the questions: how many primitive actions (APIs) are needed for a versatile embodied agent, and what should they look like? We explore this via a thought experiment: assuming that wikiHow tutorials cover a wide variety of human-written tasks, what is the space of APIs needed to cover these instructions? We propose a framework to iteratively induce new APIs by grounding wikiHow instruction to situated agent policies. Inspired by recent successes in large language models (LLMs) for embodied planning, we propose a few-shot prompting to steer GPT-4 to generate Pythonic programs as agent policies and bootstrap a universe of APIs by 1) reusing a seed set of APIs; and then 2) fabricate new API calls when necessary. The focus of this thought experiment is on defining these APIs rather than their executability. We apply the proposed pipeline on instructions from wikiHow tutorials. On a small fraction (0.5%) of tutorials, we induce an action space of 300+ APIs necessary for capturing the rich variety of tasks in the physical world. A detailed automatic and human analysis of the induction output reveals that the proposed pipeline enables effective reuse and creation of APIs. Moreover, a manual review revealed that existing simulators support only a small subset of the induced APIs (9 of the top 50 frequent APIs), motivating the development of action-rich embodied environments.

new Flooding Spread of Manipulated Knowledge in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Communities

Authors: Tianjie Ju, Yiting Wang, Xinbei Ma, Pengzhou Cheng, Haodong Zhao, Yulong Wang, Lifeng Liu, Jian Xie, Zhuosheng Zhang, Gongshen Liu

Abstract: The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in multi-agent systems has highlighted their impressive capabilities in various applications, such as collaborative problem-solving and autonomous negotiation. However, the security implications of these LLM-based multi-agent systems have not been thoroughly investigated, particularly concerning the spread of manipulated knowledge. In this paper, we investigate this critical issue by constructing a detailed threat model and a comprehensive simulation environment that mirrors real-world multi-agent deployments in a trusted platform. Subsequently, we propose a novel two-stage attack method involving Persuasiveness Injection and Manipulated Knowledge Injection to systematically explore the potential for manipulated knowledge (i.e., counterfactual and toxic knowledge) spread without explicit prompt manipulation. Our method leverages the inherent vulnerabilities of LLMs in handling world knowledge, which can be exploited by attackers to unconsciously spread fabricated information. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our attack method can successfully induce LLM-based agents to spread both counterfactual and toxic knowledge without degrading their foundational capabilities during agent communication. Furthermore, we show that these manipulations can persist through popular retrieval-augmented generation frameworks, where several benign agents store and retrieve manipulated chat histories for future interactions. This persistence indicates that even after the interaction has ended, the benign agents may continue to be influenced by manipulated knowledge. Our findings reveal significant security risks in LLM-based multi-agent systems, emphasizing the imperative need for robust defenses against manipulated knowledge spread, such as introducing ``guardian'' agents and advanced fact-checking tools.

new Attribute or Abstain: Large Language Models as Long Document Assistants

Authors: Jan Buchmann, Xiao Liu, Iryna Gurevych

Abstract: LLMs can help humans working with long documents, but are known to hallucinate. Attribution can increase trust in LLM responses: The LLM provides evidence that supports its response, which enhances verifiability. Existing approaches to attribution have only been evaluated in RAG settings, where the initial retrieval confounds LLM performance. This is crucially different from the long document setting, where retrieval is not needed, but could help. Thus, a long document specific evaluation of attribution is missing. To fill this gap, we present LAB, a benchmark of 6 diverse long document tasks with attribution, and experiment with different approaches to attribution on 4 LLMs of different sizes, both prompted and fine-tuned. We find that citation, i.e. response generation and evidence extraction in one step, mostly performs best. We investigate whether the ``Lost in the Middle'' phenomenon exists for attribution, but do not find this. We also find that evidence quality can predict response quality on datasets with simple responses, but not so for complex responses, as models struggle with providing evidence for complex claims. We release code and data for further investigation.

new Training on the Test Task Confounds Evaluation and Emergence

Authors: Ricardo Dominguez-Olmedo, Florian E. Dorner, Moritz Hardt

Abstract: We study a fundamental problem in the evaluation of large language models that we call training on the test task. Unlike wrongful practices like training on the test data, leakage, or data contamination, training on the test task is not a malpractice. Rather, the term describes a growing set of techniques to include task-relevant data in the pretraining stage of a language model. We demonstrate that training on the test task confounds both relative model evaluations and claims about emergent capabilities. We argue that the seeming superiority of one model family over another may be explained by a different degree of training on the test task. To this end, we propose an effective method to adjust for training on the test task by fine-tuning each model under comparison on the same task-relevant data before evaluation. We then show that instances of emergent behavior largely vanish once we adjust for training on the test task. This also applies to reported instances of emergent behavior that cannot be explained by the choice of evaluation metric. Our work promotes a new perspective on the evaluation of large language models with broad implications for benchmarking and the study of emergent capabilities.

cross ConvNLP: Image-based AI Text Detection

Authors: Suriya Prakash Jambunathan, Ashwath Shankarnarayan, Parijat Dube

Abstract: The potentials of Generative-AI technologies like Large Language models (LLMs) to revolutionize education are undermined by ethical considerations around their misuse which worsens the problem of academic dishonesty. LLMs like GPT-4 and Llama 2 are becoming increasingly powerful in generating sophisticated content and answering questions, from writing academic essays to solving complex math problems. Students are relying on these LLMs to complete their assignments and thus compromising academic integrity. Solutions to detect LLM-generated text are compute-intensive and often lack generalization. This paper presents a novel approach for detecting LLM-generated AI-text using a visual representation of word embedding. We have formulated a novel Convolutional Neural Network called ZigZag ResNet, as well as a scheduler for improving generalization, named ZigZag Scheduler. Through extensive evaluation using datasets of text generated by six different state-of-the-art LLMs, our model demonstrates strong intra-domain and inter-domain generalization capabilities. Our best model detects AI-generated text with an impressive average detection rate (over inter- and intra-domain test data) of 88.35%. Through an exhaustive ablation study, our ZigZag ResNet and ZigZag Scheduler provide a performance improvement of nearly 4% over the vanilla ResNet. The end-to-end inference latency of our model is below 2.5ms per sentence. Our solution offers a lightweight, computationally efficient, and faster alternative to existing tools for AI-generated text detection, with better generalization performance. It can help academic institutions in their fight against the misuse of LLMs in academic settings. Through this work, we aim to contribute to safeguarding the principles of academic integrity and ensuring the trustworthiness of student work in the era of advanced LLMs.

cross Remastering Divide and Remaster: A Cinematic Audio Source Separation Dataset with Multilingual Support

Authors: Karn N. Watcharasupat, Chih-Wei Wu, Iroro Orife

Abstract: Cinematic audio source separation (CASS) is a relatively new subtask of audio source separation, concerned with the separation of a mixture into the dialogue, music, and effects stems. To date, only one publicly available dataset exists for CASS, that is, the Divide and Remaster (DnR) dataset, which is currently at version 2. While DnR v2 has been an incredibly useful resource for CASS, several areas of improvement have been identified, particularly through its use in the 2023 Sound Demixing Challenge. In this work, we develop version 3 of the DnR dataset, addressing issues relating to vocal content in non-dialogue stems, loudness distributions, mastering process, and linguistic diversity. In particular, the dialogue stem of DnR v3 includes speech content from more than 30 languages from multiple families including but not limited to the Germanic, Romance, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, and Bantu families. Benchmark results using the Bandit model indicated that training on multilingual data yields significant generalizability to the model even in languages with low data availability. Even in languages with high data availability, the multilingual model often performs on par or better than dedicated models trained on monolingual CASS datasets.

cross HiLight: Technical Report on the Motern AI Video Language Model

Authors: Zhiting Wang, Qiangong Zhou, Kangjie Yang, Zongyang Liu. Xin Mao

Abstract: This technical report presents the implementation of a state-of-the-art video encoder for video-text modal alignment and a video conversation framework called HiLight, which features dual visual towers. The work is divided into two main parts: 1.alignment of video and text modalities; 2.convenient and efficient way to interact with users. Our goal is to address the task of video comprehension in the context of billiards. The report includes a discussion of the concepts and the final solution developed during the task's implementation.

cross GLBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Graph with Large Language Models

Authors: Yuhan Li, Peisong Wang, Xiao Zhu, Aochuan Chen, Haiyun Jiang, Deng Cai, Victor Wai Kin Chan, Jia Li

Abstract: The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the way we interact with graphs, leading to a new paradigm called GraphLLM. Despite the rapid development of GraphLLM methods in recent years, the progress and understanding of this field remain unclear due to the lack of a benchmark with consistent experimental protocols. To bridge this gap, we introduce GLBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating GraphLLM methods in both supervised and zero-shot scenarios. GLBench provides a fair and thorough evaluation of different categories of GraphLLM methods, along with traditional baselines such as graph neural networks. Through extensive experiments on a collection of real-world datasets with consistent data processing and splitting strategies, we have uncovered several key findings. Firstly, GraphLLM methods outperform traditional baselines in supervised settings, with LLM-as-enhancers showing the most robust performance. However, using LLMs as predictors is less effective and often leads to uncontrollable output issues. We also notice that no clear scaling laws exist for current GraphLLM methods. In addition, both structures and semantics are crucial for effective zero-shot transfer, and our proposed simple baseline can even outperform several models tailored for zero-shot scenarios. The data and code of the benchmark can be found at https://github.com/NineAbyss/GLBench.

URLs: https://github.com/NineAbyss/GLBench.

cross Teaching Transformers Causal Reasoning through Axiomatic Training

Authors: Aniket Vashishtha, Abhinav Kumar, Abbavaram Gowtham Reddy, Vineeth N Balasubramanian, Amit Sharma

Abstract: For text-based AI systems to interact in the real world, causal reasoning is an essential skill. Since interventional data is costly to generate, we study to what extent an agent can learn causal reasoning from passive data. Specifically, we consider an axiomatic training setup where an agent learns from multiple demonstrations of a causal axiom (or rule), rather than incorporating the axiom as an inductive bias or inferring it from data values. A key question is whether the agent would learn to generalize from the axiom demonstrations to new scenarios. For example, if a transformer model is trained on demonstrations of the causal transitivity axiom over small graphs, would it generalize to applying the transitivity axiom over large graphs? Our results, based on a novel axiomatic training scheme, indicate that such generalization is possible. We consider the task of inferring whether a variable causes another variable, given a causal graph structure. We find that a 67 million parameter transformer model, when trained on linear causal chains (along with some noisy variations) can generalize well to new kinds of graphs, including longer causal chains, causal chains with reversed order, and graphs with branching; even when it is not explicitly trained for such settings. Our model performs at par (or even better) than many larger language models such as GPT-4, Gemini Pro, and Phi-3. Overall, our axiomatic training framework provides a new paradigm of learning causal reasoning from passive data that can be used to learn arbitrary axioms, as long as sufficient demonstrations can be generated.

cross The Language of Weather: Social Media Reactions to Weather Accounting for Climatic and Linguistic Baselines

Authors: James C. Young, Rudy Arthur, Hywel T. P. Williams

Abstract: This study explores how different weather conditions influence public sentiment on social media, focusing on Twitter data from the UK. By considering climate and linguistic baselines, we improve the accuracy of weather-related sentiment analysis. Our findings show that emotional responses to weather are complex, influenced by combinations of weather variables and regional language differences. The results highlight the importance of context-sensitive methods for better understanding public mood in response to weather, which can enhance impact-based forecasting and risk communication in the context of climate change.

cross PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfer

Authors: Lucas Beyer, Andreas Steiner, Andr\'e Susano Pinto, Alexander Kolesnikov, Xiao Wang, Daniel Salz, Maxim Neumann, Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin, Michael Tschannen, Emanuele Bugliarello, Thomas Unterthiner, Daniel Keysers, Skanda Koppula, Fangyu Liu, Adam Grycner, Alexey Gritsenko, Neil Houlsby, Manoj Kumar, Keran Rong, Julian Eisenschlos, Rishabh Kabra, Matthias Bauer, Matko Bo\v{s}njak, Xi Chen, Matthias Minderer, Paul Voigtlaender, Ioana Bica, Ivana Balazevic, Joan Puigcerver, Pinelopi Papalampidi, Olivier Henaff, Xi Xiong, Radu Soricut, Jeremiah Harmsen, Xiaohua Zhai

Abstract: PaliGemma is an open Vision-Language Model (VLM) that is based on the SigLIP-So400m vision encoder and the Gemma-2B language model. It is trained to be a versatile and broadly knowledgeable base model that is effective to transfer. It achieves strong performance on a wide variety of open-world tasks. We evaluate PaliGemma on almost 40 diverse tasks including standard VLM benchmarks, but also more specialized tasks such as remote-sensing and segmentation.

cross Fine-Tuning Large Language Models with User-Level Differential Privacy

Authors: Zachary Charles, Arun Ganesh, Ryan McKenna, H. Brendan McMahan, Nicole Mitchell, Krishna Pillutla, Keith Rush

Abstract: We investigate practical and scalable algorithms for training large language models (LLMs) with user-level differential privacy (DP) in order to provably safeguard all the examples contributed by each user. We study two variants of DP-SGD with: (1) example-level sampling (ELS) and per-example gradient clipping, and (2) user-level sampling (ULS) and per-user gradient clipping. We derive a novel user-level DP accountant that allows us to compute provably tight privacy guarantees for ELS. Using this, we show that while ELS can outperform ULS in specific settings, ULS generally yields better results when each user has a diverse collection of examples. We validate our findings through experiments in synthetic mean estimation and LLM fine-tuning tasks under fixed compute budgets. We find that ULS is significantly better in settings where either (1) strong privacy guarantees are required, or (2) the compute budget is large. Notably, our focus on LLM-compatible training algorithms allows us to scale to models with hundreds of millions of parameters and datasets with hundreds of thousands of users.

cross Evaluating Large Language Models with Grid-Based Game Competitions: An Extensible LLM Benchmark and Leaderboard

Authors: Oguzhan Topsakal, Colby Jacob Edell, Jackson Bailey Harper

Abstract: We introduce a novel and extensible benchmark for large language models (LLMs) through grid-based games such as Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect-Four, and Gomoku. The open-source game simulation code, available on GitHub, allows LLMs to compete and generates detailed data files in JSON, CSV, TXT, and PNG formats for leaderboard rankings and further analysis. We present the results of games among leading LLMs, including Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3 Sonnet by Anthropic, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash by Google, GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4o by OpenAI, and Llama3-70B by Meta. We also encourage submissions of results from other LLMs. In total, we simulated 2,310 matches (5 sessions for each pair among 7 LLMs and a random player) across three types of games, using three distinct prompt types: list, illustration, and image. The results revealed significant variations in LLM performance across different games and prompt types, with analysis covering win and disqualification rates, missed opportunity analysis, and invalid move analysis. The details of the leaderboard and result matrix data are available as open-access data on GitHub. This study enhances our understanding of LLMs' capabilities in playing games they were not specifically trained for, helping to assess their rule comprehension and strategic thinking. On the path to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), this study lays the groundwork for future exploration into their utility in complex decision-making scenarios, illuminating their strategic thinking abilities and offering directions for further inquiry into the limits of LLMs within game-based frameworks.

cross AVCap: Leveraging Audio-Visual Features as Text Tokens for Captioning

Authors: Jongsuk Kim, Jiwon Shin, Junmo Kim

Abstract: In recent years, advancements in representation learning and language models have propelled Automated Captioning (AC) to new heights, enabling the generation of human-level descriptions. Leveraging these advancements, we propose \textbf{AVCap}, an \textbf{A}udio-\textbf{V}isual \textbf{Cap}tioning framework, a simple yet powerful baseline approach applicable to audio-visual captioning. AVCap utilizes audio-visual features as text tokens, which has many advantages not only in performance but also in the extensibility and scalability of the model. AVCap is designed around three pivotal dimensions: the exploration of optimal audio-visual encoder architectures, the adaptation of pre-trained models according to the characteristics of generated text, and the investigation into the efficacy of modality fusion in captioning. Our method outperforms existing audio-visual captioning methods across all metrics and the code is available on https://github.com/JongSuk1/AVCap

URLs: https://github.com/JongSuk1/AVCap

cross ROSA: Random Subspace Adaptation for Efficient Fine-Tuning

Authors: Marawan Gamal Abdel Hameed, Aristides Milios, Siva Reddy, Guillaume Rabusseau

Abstract: Model training requires significantly more memory, compared with inference. Parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods provide a means of adapting large models to downstream tasks using less memory. However, existing methods such as adapters, prompt tuning or low-rank adaptation (LoRA) either introduce latency overhead at inference time or achieve subpar downstream performance compared with full fine-tuning. In this work we propose Random Subspace Adaptation (ROSA), a method that outperforms previous PEFT methods by a significant margin, while maintaining a zero latency overhead during inference time. In contrast to previous methods, ROSA is able to adapt subspaces of arbitrarily large dimension, better approximating full-finetuning. We demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally that this makes ROSA strictly more expressive than LoRA, without consuming additional memory during runtime. As PEFT methods are especially useful in the natural language processing domain, where models operate on scales that make full fine-tuning very expensive, we evaluate ROSA in two common NLP scenarios: natural language generation (NLG) and natural language understanding (NLU) with GPT-2 and RoBERTa, respectively. We show that on almost every GLUE task ROSA outperforms LoRA by a significant margin, while also outperforming LoRA on NLG tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/rosa-paper/rosa

URLs: https://github.com/rosa-paper/rosa

cross Transformer Alignment in Large Language Models

Authors: Murdock Aubry, Haoming Meng, Anton Sugolov, Vardan Papyan

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in natural language processing, and a precise understanding of the internal mechanisms driving their success is essential. We regard LLMs as transforming embeddings via a discrete, coupled, nonlinear, dynamical system in high dimensions. This perspective motivates tracing the trajectories of individual tokens as they pass through transformer blocks, and linearizing the system along these trajectories through their Jacobian matrices. In our analysis of 38 openly available LLMs, we uncover the alignment of top left and right singular vectors of Residual Jacobians, as well as the emergence of linearity and layer-wise exponential growth. Notably, we discover that increased alignment $\textit{positively correlates}$ with model performance. Metrics evaluated post-training show significant improvement in comparison to measurements made with randomly initialized weights, highlighting the significant effects of training in transformers. These findings reveal a remarkable level of regularity that has previously been overlooked, reinforcing the dynamical interpretation and paving the way for deeper understanding and optimization of LLM architectures.

cross Decompose and Compare Consistency: Measuring VLMs' Answer Reliability via Task-Decomposition Consistency Comparison

Authors: Qian Yang, Weixiang Yan, Aishwarya Agrawal

Abstract: Despite tremendous advancements, current state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are still far from perfect. They tend to hallucinate and may generate biased responses. In such circumstances, having a way to assess the reliability of a given response generated by a VLM is quite useful. Existing methods, such as estimating uncertainty using answer likelihoods or prompt-based confidence generation, often suffer from overconfidence. Other methods use self-consistency comparison but are affected by confirmation biases. To alleviate these, we propose \textbf{De}compose and \textbf{C}ompare \textbf{C}onsistency (\texttt{DeCC}) for reliability measurement. By comparing the consistency between the direct answer generated using the VLM's internal reasoning process, and the indirect answers obtained by decomposing the question into sub-questions and reasoning over the sub-answers produced by the VLM, \texttt{DeCC} measures the reliability of VLM's direct answer. Experiments across six vision-language tasks with three VLMs show \texttt{DeCC}'s reliability estimation achieves better correlation with task accuracy compared to the existing methods.

cross FACTS About Building Retrieval Augmented Generation-based Chatbots

Authors: Rama Akkiraju, Anbang Xu, Deepak Bora, Tan Yu, Lu An, Vishal Seth, Aaditya Shukla, Pritam Gundecha, Hridhay Mehta, Ashwin Jha, Prithvi Raj, Abhinav Balasubramanian, Murali Maram, Guru Muthusamy, Shivakesh Reddy Annepally, Sidney Knowles, Min Du, Nick Burnett, Sean Javiya, Ashok Marannan, Mamta Kumari, Surbhi Jha, Ethan Dereszenski, Anupam Chakraborty, Subhash Ranjan, Amina Terfai, Anoop Surya, Tracey Mercer, Vinodh Kumar Thanigachalam, Tamar Bar, Sanjana Krishnan, Samy Kilaru, Jasmine Jaksic, Nave Algarici, Jacob Liberman, Joey Conway, Sonu Nayyar, Justin Boitano

Abstract: Enterprise chatbots, powered by generative AI, are emerging as key applications to enhance employee productivity. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Large Language Models (LLMs), and orchestration frameworks like Langchain and Llamaindex are crucial for building these chatbots. However, creating effective enterprise chatbots is challenging and requires meticulous RAG pipeline engineering. This includes fine-tuning embeddings and LLMs, extracting documents from vector databases, rephrasing queries, reranking results, designing prompts, honoring document access controls, providing concise responses, including references, safeguarding personal information, and building orchestration agents. We present a framework for building RAG-based chatbots based on our experience with three NVIDIA chatbots: for IT/HR benefits, financial earnings, and general content. Our contributions are three-fold: introducing the FACTS framework (Freshness, Architectures, Cost, Testing, Security), presenting fifteen RAG pipeline control points, and providing empirical results on accuracy-latency tradeoffs between large and small LLMs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper of its kind that provides a holistic view of the factors as well as solutions for building secure enterprise-grade chatbots."

cross Generative Image as Action Models

Authors: Mohit Shridhar, Yat Long Lo, Stephen James

Abstract: Image-generation diffusion models have been fine-tuned to unlock new capabilities such as image-editing and novel view synthesis. Can we similarly unlock image-generation models for visuomotor control? We present GENIMA, a behavior-cloning agent that fine-tunes Stable Diffusion to 'draw joint-actions' as targets on RGB images. These images are fed into a controller that maps the visual targets into a sequence of joint-positions. We study GENIMA on 25 RLBench and 9 real-world manipulation tasks. We find that, by lifting actions into image-space, internet pre-trained diffusion models can generate policies that outperform state-of-the-art visuomotor approaches, especially in robustness to scene perturbations and generalizing to novel objects. Our method is also competitive with 3D agents, despite lacking priors such as depth, keypoints, or motion-planners.

cross Towards Robust Alignment of Language Models: Distributionally Robustifying Direct Preference Optimization

Authors: Junkang Wu, Yuexiang Xie, Zhengyi Yang, Jiancan Wu, Jiawei Chen, Jinyang Gao, Bolin Ding, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He

Abstract: This study addresses the challenge of noise in training datasets for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a method for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. We categorize noise into pointwise noise, which includes low-quality data points, and pairwise noise, which encompasses erroneous data pair associations that affect preference rankings. Utilizing Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), we enhance DPO's resilience to these types of noise. Our theoretical insights reveal that DPO inherently embeds DRO principles, conferring robustness to pointwise noise, with the regularization coefficient $\beta$ playing a critical role in its noise resistance. Extending this framework, we introduce Distributionally Robustifying DPO (Dr. DPO), which integrates pairwise robustness by optimizing against worst-case pairwise scenarios. The novel hyperparameter $\beta'$ in Dr. DPO allows for fine-tuned control over data pair reliability, providing a strategic balance between exploration and exploitation in noisy training environments. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Dr. DPO substantially improves the quality of generated text and response accuracy in preference datasets, showcasing enhanced performance in both noisy and noise-free settings. The code is available at https://github.com/junkangwu/Dr_DPO.

URLs: https://github.com/junkangwu/Dr_DPO.

cross LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave: Tackling Multi-image, Video, and 3D in Large Multimodal Models

Authors: Feng Li, Renrui Zhang, Hao Zhang, Yuanhan Zhang, Bo Li, Wei Li, Zejun Ma, Chunyuan Li

Abstract: Visual instruction tuning has made considerable strides in enhancing the capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). However, existing open LMMs largely focus on single-image tasks, their applications to multi-image scenarios remains less explored. Additionally, prior LMM research separately tackles different scenarios, leaving it impossible to generalize cross scenarios with new emerging capabilities. To this end, we introduce LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave, which simultaneously tackles Multi-image, Multi-frame (video), Multi-view (3D), and Multi-patch (single-image) scenarios in LMMs. To enable these capabilities, we regard the interleaved data format as a general template and compile the M4-Instruct dataset with 1,177.6k samples, spanning 4 primary domains with 14 tasks and 41 datasets. We also curate the LLaVA-Interleave Bench to comprehensively evaluate the multi-image performance of LMMs. Through extensive experiments, LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave achieves leading results in multi-image, video, and 3D benchmarks, while maintaining the performance of single-image tasks. Besides, our model also exhibits several emerging capabilities, e.g., transferring tasks across different settings and modalities. Code is available at https://github.com/LLaVA-VL/LLaVA-NeXT

URLs: https://github.com/LLaVA-VL/LLaVA-NeXT

replace Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting Elicits Translation in Large Language Models

Authors: Hongyuan Lu, Haoran Yang, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Wai Lam, Furu Wei

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) even when trained without parallel data. Yet, despite the fact that the amount of training data is gigantic, they still struggle with translating rare words, particularly for low-resource languages. Even worse, it is usually unrealistic to retrieve relevant demonstrations for in-context learning with low-resource languages on LLMs, which restricts the practical use of LLMs for translation -- how should we mitigate this problem? To this end, we present a novel method, CoD, which augments LLMs with prior knowledge with the chains of multilingual dictionaries for a subset of input words to elicit translation abilities for LLMs. Extensive experiments indicate that augmenting ChatGPT with CoD elicits large gains by up to 13x chrF++ points for MNMT (3.08 to 42.63 for English to Serbian written in Cyrillic script) on FLORES-200 full devtest set. We further demonstrate the importance of chaining the multilingual dictionaries, as well as the superiority of CoD to few-shot demonstration for low-resource languages.

replace ConGraT: Self-Supervised Contrastive Pretraining for Joint Graph and Text Embeddings

Authors: William Brannon, Wonjune Kang, Suyash Fulay, Hang Jiang, Brandon Roy, Deb Roy, Jad Kabbara

Abstract: Learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs), in which nodes are associated with one or more texts, has been the subject of much recent work. However, most approaches tend to make strong assumptions about the downstream task of interest, are reliant on hand-labeled data, or fail to equally balance the importance of both text and graph representations. In this work, we propose Contrastive Graph-Text pretraining (ConGraT), a general, self-supervised approach for jointly learning separate representations of texts and nodes in a TAG. Our method trains a language model (LM) and a graph neural network (GNN) to align their representations in a common latent space using a batch-wise contrastive learning objective inspired by CLIP. We further propose an extension to the CLIP objective that leverages graph structure to incorporate information about inter-node similarity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConGraT outperforms baselines on various downstream tasks, including node and text category classification, link prediction, and language modeling. Finally, we present an application of our method to community detection in social graphs, which enables finding more textually grounded communities, rather than purely graph-based ones. Code and certain datasets are available at https://github.com/wwbrannon/congrat.

URLs: https://github.com/wwbrannon/congrat.

replace Using Natural Language Explanations to Rescale Human Judgments

Authors: Manya Wadhwa, Jifan Chen, Junyi Jessy Li, Greg Durrett

Abstract: The rise of large language models (LLMs) has brought a critical need for high-quality human-labeled data, particularly for processes like human feedback and evaluation. A common practice is to label data via consensus annotation over human judgments. However, annotators' judgments for subjective tasks can differ in many ways: they may reflect different qualitative judgments about an example, and they may be mapped to a labeling scheme in different ways. We show that these nuances can be captured by natural language explanations, and propose a method to rescale ordinal annotations and explanations using LLMs. Specifically, we feed annotators' Likert ratings and corresponding explanations into an LLM and prompt it to produce a numeric score anchored in a scoring rubric. These scores should reflect the annotators' underlying assessments of the example. The rubric can be designed or modified after annotation, and include distinctions that may not have been known when the original error taxonomy was devised. We explore our technique in the context of rating system outputs for a document-grounded question answering task, where LLMs achieve near-human performance. Our method rescales the raw judgments without impacting agreement and brings the scores closer to human judgments grounded in the same scoring rubric.

replace Just CHOP: Embarrassingly Simple LLM Compression

Authors: Ananya Harsh Jha, Tom Sherborne, Evan Pete Walsh, Dirk Groeneveld, Emma Strubell, Iz Beltagy

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) enable unparalleled few- and zero-shot reasoning capabilities but at a high computational footprint. A growing assortment of methods for compression promises to reduce the computational burden of LLMs in deployment, but so far, only quantization approaches have been demonstrated to be effective for LLM compression while maintaining zero-shot performance. A critical step in the compression process, the pretrain-then-finetune paradigm, has largely been overlooked when adapting existing pruning strategies to LLMs or proposing new ones. In this work, we show that embarrassingly simple layer pruning coupled with an extended language model pretraining as the finetuning phase produces state-of-the-art results against structured and even semi-structured compression of models at a 7B scale while being more inference efficient. We call this method LayerChop, where we deterministically remove layers from a model followed by task-agnostic finetuning of the remaining weights by continued self-supervised pretraining. At this scale, we also show how distillation, which has been super effective in task-agnostic compression of smaller BERT-style models, becomes inefficient against our simple pruning technique.

replace CIDER: Context sensitive sentiment analysis for short-form text

Authors: James C. Young, Rudy Arthur, Hywel T. P. Williams

Abstract: Researchers commonly perform sentiment analysis on large collections of short texts like tweets, Reddit posts or newspaper headlines that are all focused on a specific topic, theme or event. Usually, general-purpose sentiment analysis methods are used. These perform well on average but miss the variation in meaning that happens across different contexts, for example, the word "active" has a very different intention and valence in the phrase "active lifestyle" versus "active volcano". This work presents a new approach, CIDER (Context Informed Dictionary and sEmantic Reasoner), which performs context-sensitive linguistic analysis, where the valence of sentiment-laden terms is inferred from the whole corpus before being used to score the individual texts. In this paper, we detail the CIDER algorithm and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art generalist unsupervised sentiment analysis techniques on a large collection of tweets about the weather. CIDER is also applicable to alternative (non-sentiment) linguistic scales. A case study on gender in the UK is presented, with the identification of highly gendered and sentiment-laden days. We have made our implementation of CIDER available as a Python package: https://pypi.org/project/ciderpolarity/.

URLs: https://pypi.org/project/ciderpolarity/.

replace Can LLMs Augment Low-Resource Reading Comprehension Datasets? Opportunities and Challenges

Authors: Vinay Samuel, Houda Aynaou, Arijit Ghosh Chowdhury, Karthik Venkat Ramanan, Aman Chadha

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero shot performance on a wide range of NLP tasks, demonstrating the ability to reason and apply commonsense. A relevant application is to use them for creating high quality synthetic datasets for downstream tasks. In this work, we probe whether GPT-4 can be used to augment existing extractive reading comprehension datasets. Automating data annotation processes has the potential to save large amounts of time, money and effort that goes into manually labelling datasets. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of GPT-4 as a replacement for human annotators for low resource reading comprehension tasks, by comparing performance after fine tuning, and the cost associated with annotation. This work serves to be the first analysis of LLMs as synthetic data augmenters for QA systems, highlighting the unique opportunities and challenges. Additionally, we release augmented versions of low resource datasets, that will allow the research community to create further benchmarks for evaluation of generated datasets.

replace SIP: Injecting a Structural Inductive Bias into a Seq2Seq Model by Simulation

Authors: Matthias Lindemann, Alexander Koller, Ivan Titov

Abstract: Strong inductive biases enable learning from little data and help generalization outside of the training distribution. Popular neural architectures such as Transformers lack strong structural inductive biases for seq2seq NLP tasks on their own. Consequently, they struggle with systematic generalization beyond the training distribution, e.g. with extrapolating to longer inputs, even when pre-trained on large amounts of text. We show how a structural inductive bias can be efficiently injected into a seq2seq model by pre-training it to simulate structural transformations on synthetic data. Specifically, we inject an inductive bias towards Finite State Transducers (FSTs) into a Transformer by pre-training it to simulate FSTs given their descriptions. Our experiments show that our method imparts the desired inductive bias, resulting in improved systematic generalization and better few-shot learning for FST-like tasks. Our analysis shows that fine-tuned models accurately capture the state dynamics of the unseen underlying FSTs, suggesting that the simulation process is internalized by the fine-tuned model.

replace A New Approach Towards Autoformalization

Authors: Nilay Patel, Rahul Saha, Jeffrey Flanigan

Abstract: Verifying mathematical proofs is difficult, but can be automated with the assistance of a computer. Autoformalization is the task of automatically translating natural language mathematics into a formal language that can be verified by a program. This is a challenging task, and especially for higher-level mathematics found in research papers. Research paper mathematics requires large amounts of background and context. In this paper, we propose an avenue towards tackling autoformalization for research-level mathematics, by breaking the task into easier and more approachable subtasks: unlinked formalization (formalization with unlinked definitions and theorems), entity linking (linking to the proper theorems and definitions), and finally adjusting types so it passes the type checker. In addition, we present arXiv2Formal, a benchmark dataset for unlinked formalization consisting of 50 theorems formalized for the Lean theorem prover sampled from papers on arXiv.org. We welcome any contributions from the community to future versions of this dataset.

replace To Translate or Not to Translate: A Systematic Investigation of Translation-Based Cross-Lingual Transfer to Low-Resource Languages

Authors: Benedikt Ebing, Goran Glava\v{s}

Abstract: Perfect machine translation (MT) would render cross-lingual transfer (XLT) by means of multilingual language models (mLMs) superfluous. Given, on the one hand, the large body of work on improving XLT with mLMs and, on the other hand, recent advances in massively multilingual MT, in this work, we systematically evaluate existing and propose new translation-based XLT approaches for transfer to low-resource languages. We show that all translation-based approaches dramatically outperform zero-shot XLT with mLMs -- with the combination of round-trip translation of the source-language training data and the translation of the target-language test instances at inference -- being generally the most effective. We next show that one can obtain further empirical gains by adding reliable translations to other high-resource languages to the training data. Moreover, we propose an effective translation-based XLT strategy even for languages not supported by the MT system. Finally, we show that model selection for XLT based on target-language validation data obtained with MT outperforms model selection based on the source-language data. We believe our findings warrant a broader inclusion of more robust translation-based baselines in XLT research.

replace Relying on the Unreliable: The Impact of Language Models' Reluctance to Express Uncertainty

Authors: Kaitlyn Zhou, Jena D. Hwang, Xiang Ren, Maarten Sap

Abstract: As natural language becomes the default interface for human-AI interaction, there is a need for LMs to appropriately communicate uncertainties in downstream applications. In this work, we investigate how LMs incorporate confidence in responses via natural language and how downstream users behave in response to LM-articulated uncertainties. We examine publicly deployed models and find that LMs are reluctant to express uncertainties when answering questions even when they produce incorrect responses. LMs can be explicitly prompted to express confidences, but tend to be overconfident, resulting in high error rates (an average of 47%) among confident responses. We test the risks of LM overconfidence by conducting human experiments and show that users rely heavily on LM generations, whether or not they are marked by certainty. Lastly, we investigate the preference-annotated datasets used in post training alignment and find that humans are biased against texts with uncertainty. Our work highlights new safety harms facing human-LM interactions and proposes design recommendations and mitigating strategies moving forward.

replace Same Task, More Tokens: the Impact of Input Length on the Reasoning Performance of Large Language Models

Authors: Mosh Levy, Alon Jacoby, Yoav Goldberg

Abstract: This paper explores the impact of extending input lengths on the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite LLMs advancements in recent times, their performance consistency across different input lengths is not well understood. We investigate this aspect by introducing a novel QA reasoning framework, specifically designed to assess the impact of input length. We isolate the effect of input length using multiple versions of the same sample, each being extended with padding of different lengths, types and locations. Our findings show a notable degradation in LLMs' reasoning performance at much shorter input lengths than their technical maximum. We show that the degradation trend appears in every version of our dataset, although at different intensities. Additionally, our study reveals that the traditional metric of next word prediction correlates negatively with performance of LLMs' on our reasoning dataset. We analyse our results and identify failure modes that can serve as useful guides for future research, potentially informing strategies to address the limitations observed in LLMs.

replace An Improved Traditional Chinese Evaluation Suite for Foundation Model

Authors: Zhi-Rui Tam, Ya-Ting Pai, Yen-Wei Lee, Jun-Da Chen, Wei-Min Chu, Sega Cheng, Hong-Han Shuai

Abstract: We present TMMLU+, a new benchmark designed for Traditional Chinese language understanding. TMMLU+ is a multi-choice question-answering dataset with 66 subjects from elementary to professional level. It is six times larger and boasts a more balanced subject distribution than its predecessor, Taiwan Massive Multitask Language Understanding (TMMLU). We also benchmark closed-source models and 26 open-weight Chinese large language models (LLMs) of parameters ranging from 1.8B to 72B on the proposed TMMLU+. Our findings reveal that (1.) Traditional Chinese models still trail behind their Simplified Chinese counterparts, highlighting a need for more focused advancements in LLMs catering to Traditional Chinese. (2.) Current LLMs still fall short of human performance in average scores, indicating a potential need for future research to delve deeper into social science and humanities subjects. (3.) Among all the tokenization compression metrics examined, we identify that only the fertility score uniquely demonstrates strong correlations with our benchmark results. We foresee that TMMLU+ will pinpoint areas for future model improvement, thereby narrowing the gap between machine and human linguistic capabilities and supporting researchers in developing Traditional Chinese LLMs. Our dataset, along with the benchmark source code, is accessible at huggingface.co/datasets/ikala/tmmluplus.

replace Trial and Error: Exploration-Based Trajectory Optimization for LLM Agents

Authors: Yifan Song, Da Yin, Xiang Yue, Jie Huang, Sujian Li, Bill Yuchen Lin

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral components in various autonomous agent systems. In this study, we present an exploration-based trajectory optimization approach, referred to as ETO. This learning method is designed to enhance the performance of open LLM agents. Contrary to previous studies that exclusively train on successful expert trajectories, our method allows agents to learn from their exploration failures. This leads to improved performance through an iterative optimization framework. During the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment while completing given tasks, gathering failure trajectories to create contrastive trajectory pairs. In the subsequent training phase, the agent utilizes these trajectory preference pairs to update its policy using contrastive learning methods like DPO. This iterative cycle of exploration and training fosters continued improvement in the agents. Our experiments on three complex tasks demonstrate that ETO consistently surpasses baseline performance by a large margin. Furthermore, an examination of task-solving efficiency and potential in scenarios lacking expert trajectory underscores the effectiveness of our approach.

replace Measuring Meaning Composition in the Human Brain with Composition Scores from Large Language Models

Authors: Changjiang Gao, Jixing Li, Jiajun Chen, Shujian Huang

Abstract: The process of meaning composition, wherein smaller units like morphemes or words combine to form the meaning of phrases and sentences, is essential for human sentence comprehension. Despite extensive neurolinguistic research into the brain regions involved in meaning composition, a computational metric to quantify the extent of composition is still lacking. Drawing on the key-value memory interpretation of transformer feed-forward network blocks, we introduce the Composition Score, a novel model-based metric designed to quantify the degree of meaning composition during sentence comprehension. Experimental findings show that this metric correlates with brain clusters associated with word frequency, structural processing, and general sensitivity to words, suggesting the multifaceted nature of meaning composition during human sentence comprehension.

replace Instruction Multi-Constraint Molecular Generation Using a Teacher-Student Large Language Model

Authors: Peng Zhou, Jianmin Wang, Chunyan Li, Zixu Wang, Yiping Liu, Siqi Sun, Jianxin Lin, Leyi Wei, Xibao Cai, Houtim Lai, Wei Liu, Longyue Wang, Xiangxiang Zeng

Abstract: While various models and computational tools have been proposed for structure and property analysis of molecules, generating molecules that conform to all desired structures and properties remains a challenge. Here, we introduce a multi-constraint molecular generation large language model, TSMMG, which, akin to a student, incorporates knowledge from various small models and tools, namely, the 'teachers'. To train TSMMG, we construct a large set of text-molecule pairs by extracting molecular knowledge from these 'teachers', enabling it to generate novel molecules that conform to the descriptions through various text prompts. We experimentally show that TSMMG remarkably performs in generating molecules meeting complex, natural language-described property requirements across two-, three-, and four-constraint tasks, with an average molecular validity of over 99% and success ratio of 82.58%, 68.03%, and 67.48%, respectively. The model also exhibits adaptability through zero-shot testing, creating molecules that satisfy combinations of properties that have not been encountered. It can comprehend text inputs with various language styles, extending beyond the confines of outlined prompts, as confirmed through empirical validation. Additionally, the knowledge distillation feature of TSMMG contributes to the continuous enhancement of small models, while the innovative approach to dataset construction effectively addresses the issues of data scarcity and quality, which positions TSMMG as a promising tool in the domains of drug discovery and materials science.

replace CHOPS: CHat with custOmer Profile Systems for Customer Service with LLMs

Authors: Jingzhe Shi, Jialuo Li, Qinwei Ma, Zaiwen Yang, Huan Ma, Lei Li

Abstract: Businesses and software platforms are increasingly turning to Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GLM-3, and LLaMa-2 for chat assistance with file access or as reasoning agents for customer service. However, current LLM-based customer service models have limited integration with customer profiles and lack the operational capabilities necessary for effective service. Moreover, existing API integrations emphasize diversity over the precision and error avoidance essential in real-world customer service scenarios. To address these issues, we propose an LLM agent named CHOPS (CHat with custOmer Profile in existing System), designed to: (1) efficiently utilize existing databases or systems for accessing user information or interacting with these systems following existing guidelines; (2) provide accurate and reasonable responses or carry out required operations in the system while avoiding harmful operations; and (3) leverage a combination of small and large LLMs to achieve satisfying performance at a reasonable inference cost. We introduce a practical dataset, the CPHOS-dataset, which includes a database, guiding files, and QA pairs collected from CPHOS, an online platform that facilitates the organization of simulated Physics Olympiads for high school teachers and students. We have conducted extensive experiments to validate the performance of our proposed CHOPS architecture using the CPHOS-dataset, with the aim of demonstrating how LLMs can enhance or serve as alternatives to human customer service. Code for our proposed architecture and dataset can be found at {https://github.com/JingzheShi/CHOPS}.

URLs: https://github.com/JingzheShi/CHOPS

replace Transforming LLMs into Cross-modal and Cross-lingual Retrieval Systems

Authors: Frank Palma Gomez, Ramon Sanabria, Yun-hsuan Sung, Daniel Cer, Siddharth Dalmia, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are trained on text-only data that go far beyond the languages with paired speech and text data. At the same time, Dual Encoder (DE) based retrieval systems project queries and documents into the same embedding space and have demonstrated their success in retrieval and bi-text mining. To match speech and text in many languages, we propose using LLMs to initialize multi-modal DE retrieval systems. Unlike traditional methods, our system doesn't require speech data during LLM pre-training and can exploit LLM's multilingual text understanding capabilities to match speech and text in languages unseen during retrieval training. Our multi-modal LLM-based retrieval system is capable of matching speech and text in 102 languages despite only training on 21 languages. Our system outperforms previous systems trained explicitly on all 102 languages. We achieve a 10% absolute improvement in Recall@1 averaged across these languages. Additionally, our model demonstrates cross-lingual speech and text matching, which is further enhanced by readily available machine translation data.

replace A Bi-consolidating Model for Joint Relational Triple Extraction

Authors: Xiaocheng Luo, Yanping Chen, Ruixue Tang, Caiwei Yang, Ruizhang Huang, Yongbin Qin

Abstract: Current methods to extract relational triples directly make a prediction based on a possible entity pair in a raw sentence without depending on entity recognition. The task suffers from a serious semantic overlapping problem, in which several relation triples may share one or two entities in a sentence. In this paper, based on a two-dimensional sentence representation, a bi-consolidating model is proposed to address this problem by simultaneously reinforcing the local and global semantic features relevant to a relation triple. This model consists of a local consolidation component and a global consolidation component. The first component uses a pixel difference convolution to enhance semantic information of a possible triple representation from adjacent regions and mitigate noise in neighbouring neighbours. The second component strengthens the triple representation based a channel attention and a spatial attention, which has the advantage to learn remote semantic dependencies in a sentence. They are helpful to improve the performance of both entity identification and relation type classification in relation triple extraction. After evaluated on several publish datasets, the bi-consolidating model achieves competitive performance. Analytical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for relational triple extraction and give motivation for other natural language processing tasks.

replace Chinese Tiny LLM: Pretraining a Chinese-Centric Large Language Model

Authors: Xinrun Du, Zhouliang Yu, Songyang Gao, Ding Pan, Yuyang Cheng, Ziyang Ma, Ruibin Yuan, Xingwei Qu, Jiaheng Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Xinchen Luo, Guorui Zhou, Wenhu Chen, Ge Zhang

Abstract: In this study, we introduce CT-LLM, a 2B large language model (LLM) that illustrates a pivotal shift towards prioritizing the Chinese language in developing LLMs. Uniquely initiated from scratch, CT-LLM diverges from the conventional methodology by primarily incorporating Chinese textual data, utilizing an extensive corpus of 1,200 billion tokens, including 800 billion Chinese tokens, 300 billion English tokens, and 100 billion code tokens. This strategic composition facilitates the model's exceptional proficiency in understanding and processing Chinese, a capability further enhanced through alignment techniques. Demonstrating remarkable performance on the CHC-Bench, CT-LLM excels in Chinese language tasks, and showcases its adeptness in English through SFT. This research challenges the prevailing paradigm of training LLMs predominantly on English corpora and then adapting them to other languages, broadening the horizons for LLM training methodologies. By open-sourcing the full process of training a Chinese LLM, including a detailed data processing procedure with the obtained Massive Appropriate Pretraining Chinese Corpus (MAP-CC), a well-chosen multidisciplinary Chinese Hard Case Benchmark (CHC-Bench), and the 2B-size Chinese Tiny LLM (CT-LLM), we aim to foster further exploration and innovation in both academia and industry, paving the way for more inclusive and versatile language models.

replace Lossless Acceleration of Large Language Model via Adaptive N-gram Parallel Decoding

Authors: Jie Ou, Yueming Chen, Wenhong Tian

Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities, they are hindered by significant resource consumption and considerable latency due to autoregressive processing. In this study, we introduce Adaptive N-gram Parallel Decoding (ANPD), an innovative and lossless approach that accelerates inference by allowing the simultaneous generation of multiple tokens. ANPD incorporates a two-stage approach: it begins with a rapid drafting phase that employs an N-gram module, which adapts based on the current interactive context, followed by a verification phase, during which the original LLM assesses and confirms the proposed tokens. Consequently, ANPD preserves the integrity of the LLM's original output while enhancing processing speed. We further leverage a multi-level architecture for the N-gram module to enhance the precision of the initial draft, consequently reducing inference latency. ANPD eliminates the need for retraining or extra GPU memory, making it an efficient and plug-and-play enhancement. In our experiments, models such as LLaMA and its fine-tuned variants have shown speed improvements up to 3.67x, validating the effectiveness of our proposed ANPD.

replace Cooperate or Collapse: Emergence of Sustainable Cooperation in a Society of LLM Agents

Authors: Giorgio Piatti, Zhijing Jin, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Mrinmaya Sachan, Rada Mihalcea

Abstract: As AI systems pervade human life, ensuring that large language models (LLMs) make safe decisions remains a significant challenge. We introduce the Governance of the Commons Simulation (GovSim), a generative simulation platform designed to study strategic interactions and cooperative decision-making in LLMs. In GovSim, a society of AI agents must collectively balance exploiting a common resource with sustaining it for future use. This environment enables the study of how ethical considerations, strategic planning, and negotiation skills impact cooperative outcomes. We develop an LLM-based agent architecture and test it with the leading open and closed LLMs. We find that all but the most powerful LLM agents fail to achieve a sustainable equilibrium in GovSim, with the highest survival rate below 54%. Ablations reveal that successful multi-agent communication between agents is critical for achieving cooperation in these cases. Furthermore, our analyses show that the failure to achieve sustainable cooperation in most LLMs stems from their inability to formulate and analyze hypotheses about the long-term effects of their actions on the equilibrium of the group. Finally, we show that agents that leverage "Universalization"-based reasoning, a theory of moral thinking, are able to achieve significantly better sustainability. Taken together, GovSim enables us to study the mechanisms that underlie sustainable self-government with specificity and scale. We open source the full suite of our research results, including the simulation environment, agent prompts, and a comprehensive web interface.

replace CRAFT: Extracting and Tuning Cultural Instructions from the Wild

Authors: Bin Wang, Geyu Lin, Zhengyuan Liu, Chengwei Wei, Nancy F. Chen

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly evolved as the foundation of various natural language processing (NLP) applications. Despite their wide use cases, their understanding of culturally-related concepts and reasoning remains limited. Meantime, there is a significant need to enhance these models' cultural reasoning capabilities, especially concerning underrepresented regions. This paper introduces a novel pipeline for extracting high-quality, culturally-related instruction tuning datasets from vast unstructured corpora. We utilize a self-instruction generation pipeline to identify cultural concepts and trigger instruction. By integrating with a general-purpose instruction tuning dataset, our model demonstrates enhanced capabilities in recognizing and understanding regional cultural nuances, thereby enhancing its reasoning capabilities. We conduct experiments across three regions: Singapore, the Philippines, and the United States, achieving performance improvement of up to 6%. Our research opens new avenues for extracting cultural instruction tuning sets directly from unstructured data, setting a precedent for future innovations in the field.

replace Is Your LLM Outdated? Evaluating LLMs at Temporal Generalization

Authors: Chenghao Zhu, Nuo Chen, Yufei Gao, Yunyi Zhang, Prayag Tiwari, Benyou Wang

Abstract: The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) highlights the urgent need for evolving evaluation methodologies that keep pace with improvements in language comprehension and information processing. However, traditional benchmarks, which are often static, fail to capture the continually changing information landscape, leading to a disparity between the perceived and actual effectiveness of LLMs in ever-changing real-world scenarios. Our study examines temporal generalization, which includes the ability to understand, predict, and generate text relevant to past, present, and future contexts, revealing significant temporal biases in LLMs. We propose an evaluation framework, for dynamically generating benchmarks from recent real-world predictions. Experiments demonstrate that LLMs struggle with temporal generalization, showing performance decline over time. These findings highlight the necessity for improved training and updating processes to enhance adaptability and reduce biases. Our code, dataset and benchmark are available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/FreshBench.

URLs: https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/FreshBench.

replace SciQAG: A Framework for Auto-Generated Science Question Answering Dataset with Fine-grained Evaluation

Authors: Yuwei Wan, Yixuan Liu, Aswathy Ajith, Clara Grazian, Bram Hoex, Wenjie Zhang, Chunyu Kit, Tong Xie, Ian Foster

Abstract: We introduce SciQAG, a novel framework for automatically generating high-quality science question-answer pairs from a large corpus of scientific literature based on large language models (LLMs). SciQAG consists of a QA generator and a QA evaluator, which work together to extract diverse and research-level questions and answers from scientific papers. Utilizing this framework, we construct a large-scale, high-quality, open-ended science QA dataset containing 188,042 QA pairs extracted from 22,743 scientific papers across 24 scientific domains. We also introduce SciQAG-24D, a new benchmark task designed to evaluate the science question-answering ability of LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning LLMs on the SciQAG dataset significantly improves their performance on both open-ended question answering and scientific tasks. To foster research and collaboration, we make the datasets, models, and evaluation codes publicly available, contributing to the advancement of science question answering and developing more interpretable and reasoning-capable AI systems.

replace Evaluating the Adversarial Robustness of Retrieval-Based In-Context Learning for Large Language Models

Authors: Simon Chi Lok Yu, Jie He, Pasquale Minervini, Jeff Z. Pan

Abstract: With the emergence of large language models, such as LLaMA and OpenAI GPT-3, In-Context Learning (ICL) gained significant attention due to its effectiveness and efficiency. However, ICL is very sensitive to the choice, order, and verbaliser used to encode the demonstrations in the prompt. Retrieval-Augmented ICL methods try to address this problem by leveraging retrievers to extract semantically related examples as demonstrations. While this approach yields more accurate results, its robustness against various types of adversarial attacks, including perturbations on test samples, demonstrations, and retrieved data, remains under-explored. Our study reveals that retrieval-augmented models can enhance robustness against test sample attacks, outperforming vanilla ICL with a 4.87% reduction in Attack Success Rate (ASR); however, they exhibit overconfidence in the demonstrations, leading to a 2% increase in ASR for demonstration attacks. Adversarial training can help improve the robustness of ICL methods to adversarial attacks; however, such a training scheme can be too costly in the context of LLMs. As an alternative, we introduce an effective training-free adversarial defence method, DARD, which enriches the example pool with those attacked samples. We show that DARD yields improvements in performance and robustness, achieving a 15% reduction in ASR over the baselines. Code and data are released to encourage further research: https://github.com/simonucl/adv-retreival-icl

URLs: https://github.com/simonucl/adv-retreival-icl

replace Multi-objective Representation for Numbers in Clinical Narratives Using CamemBERT-bio

Authors: Boammani Aser Lompo, Thanh-Dung Le

Abstract: This research aims to classify numerical values extracted from medical documents across seven distinct physiological categories, employing CamemBERT-bio. Previous studies suggested that transformer-based models might not perform as well as traditional NLP models in such tasks. To enhance CamemBERT-bio's performances, we introduce two main innovations: integrating keyword embeddings into the model and adopting a number-agnostic strategy by excluding all numerical data from the text. The implementation of label embedding techniques refines the attention mechanisms, while the technique of using a `numerical-blind' dataset aims to bolster context-centric learning. Another key component of our research is determining the criticality of extracted numerical data. To achieve this, we utilized a simple approach that involves verifying if the value falls within the established standard ranges. Our findings are encouraging, showing substantial improvements in the effectiveness of CamemBERT-bio, surpassing conventional methods with an F1 score of 0.89. This represents an over 20\% increase over the 0.73 $F_1$ score of traditional approaches and an over 9\% increase over the 0.82 $F_1$ score of state-of-the-art approaches. All this was achieved despite using small and imbalanced training datasets.

replace MAP-Neo: Highly Capable and Transparent Bilingual Large Language Model Series

Authors: Ge Zhang, Scott Qu, Jiaheng Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Chenghua Lin, Chou Leuang Yu, Danny Pan, Esther Cheng, Jie Liu, Qunshu Lin, Raven Yuan, Tuney Zheng, Wei Pang, Xinrun Du, Yiming Liang, Yinghao Ma, Yizhi Li, Ziyang Ma, Bill Lin, Emmanouil Benetos, Huan Yang, Junting Zhou, Kaijing Ma, Minghao Liu, Morry Niu, Noah Wang, Quehry Que, Ruibo Liu, Sine Liu, Shawn Guo, Soren Gao, Wangchunshu Zhou, Xinyue Zhang, Yizhi Zhou, Yubo Wang, Yuelin Bai, Yuhan Zhang, Yuxiang Zhang, Zenith Wang, Zhenzhu Yang, Zijian Zhao, Jiajun Zhang, Wanli Ouyang, Wenhao Huang, Wenhu Chen

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made great strides in recent years to achieve unprecedented performance across different tasks. However, due to commercial interest, the most competitive models like GPT, Gemini, and Claude have been gated behind proprietary interfaces without disclosing the training details. Recently, many institutions have open-sourced several strong LLMs like LLaMA-3, comparable to existing closed-source LLMs. However, only the model's weights are provided with most details (e.g., intermediate checkpoints, pre-training corpus, and training code, etc.) being undisclosed. To improve the transparency of LLMs, the research community has formed to open-source truly open LLMs (e.g., Pythia, Amber, OLMo), where more details (e.g., pre-training corpus and training code) are being provided. These models have greatly advanced the scientific study of these large models including their strengths, weaknesses, biases and risks. However, we observe that the existing truly open LLMs on reasoning, knowledge, and coding tasks are still inferior to existing state-of-the-art LLMs with similar model sizes. To this end, we open-source MAP-Neo, a highly capable and transparent bilingual language model with 7B parameters trained from scratch on 4.5T high-quality tokens. Our MAP-Neo is the first fully open-sourced bilingual LLM with comparable performance compared to existing state-of-the-art LLMs. Moreover, we open-source all details to reproduce our MAP-Neo, where the cleaned pre-training corpus, data cleaning pipeline, checkpoints, and well-optimized training/evaluation framework are provided. Finally, we hope our MAP-Neo will enhance and strengthen the open research community and inspire more innovations and creativities to facilitate the further improvements of LLMs.

replace mCoT: Multilingual Instruction Tuning for Reasoning Consistency in Language Models

Authors: Huiyuan Lai, Malvina Nissim

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) with Chain-of-thought (CoT) have recently emerged as a powerful technique for eliciting reasoning to improve various downstream tasks. As most research mainly focuses on English, with few explorations in a multilingual context, the question of how reliable this reasoning capability is in different languages is still open. To address it directly, we study multilingual reasoning consistency across multiple languages, using popular open-source LLMs. First, we compile the first large-scale multilingual math reasoning dataset, mCoT-MATH, covering eleven diverse languages. Then, we introduce multilingual CoT instruction tuning to boost reasoning capability across languages, thereby improving model consistency. While existing LLMs show substantial variation across the languages we consider, and especially low performance for lesser resourced languages, our 7B parameter model mCoT achieves impressive consistency across languages, and superior or comparable performance to close- and open-source models even of much larger sizes.

replace SCAR: Efficient Instruction-Tuning for Large Language Models via Style Consistency-Aware Response Ranking

Authors: Zhuang Li, Yuncheng Hua, Thuy-Trang Vu, Haolan Zhan, Lizhen Qu, Gholamreza Haffari

Abstract: Recent studies have shown that maintaining a consistent response style by human experts and enhancing data quality in training sets can significantly improve the performance of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) while reducing the number of training examples needed. However, the precise definition of style and the relationship between style, data quality, and LLM performance remains unclear. This research decomposes response style into presentation and composition styles and finds that, among training data of similar quality, those with higher style consistency lead to better LLM performance. Inspired by this, we introduce Style Consistency-Aware Response Ranking (SCAR), which automatically prioritizes instruction-response pairs in the training set based on their response stylistic consistency. By selecting the most style-consistent examples, ranging from the top 25% to 0.7% of the full dataset, the fine-tuned LLMs can match or even surpass the performance of models trained on the entire dataset in coding and open-ended question-answering benchmarks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zhuang-li/SCAR .

URLs: https://github.com/zhuang-li/SCAR

replace Promises, Outlooks and Challenges of Diffusion Language Modeling

Authors: Justin Deschenaux, Caglar Gulcehre

Abstract: The modern autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved outstanding performance on NLP benchmarks, and they are deployed in the real world. However, they still suffer from limitations of the autoregressive training paradigm. For example, autoregressive token generation is notably slow and can be prone to \textit{exposure bias}. The diffusion-based language models were proposed as an alternative to autoregressive generation to address some of these limitations. We evaluate the recently proposed Score Entropy Discrete Diffusion (SEDD) approach and show it is a promising alternative to autoregressive generation but it has some short-comings too. We empirically demonstrate the advantages and challenges of SEDD, and observe that SEDD generally matches autoregressive models in perplexity and on benchmarks such as HellaSwag, Arc or WinoGrande. Additionally, we show that in terms of inference latency, SEDD can be up to 4.5$\times$ more efficient than GPT-2. While SEDD allows conditioning on tokens at abitrary positions, SEDD appears slightly weaker than GPT-2 for conditional generation given short prompts. Finally, we reproduced the main results from the original SEDD paper.

replace Flood of Techniques and Drought of Theories: Emotion Mining in Disasters

Authors: Soheil Shapouri, Saber Soleymani, Saed Rezayi

Abstract: Emotion mining has become a crucial tool for understanding human emotions during disasters, leveraging the extensive data generated on social media platforms. This paper aims to summarize existing research on emotion mining within disaster contexts, highlighting both significant discoveries and persistent issues. On the one hand, emotion mining techniques have achieved acceptable accuracy enabling applications such as rapid damage assessment and mental health surveillance. On the other hand, with many studies adopting data-driven approaches, several methodological issues remain. These include arbitrary emotion classification, ignoring biases inherent in data collection from social media, such as the overrepresentation of individuals from higher socioeconomic status on Twitter, and the lack of application of theoretical frameworks like cross-cultural comparisons. These problems can be summarized as a notable lack of theory-driven research and ignoring insights from social and behavioral sciences. This paper underscores the need for interdisciplinary collaboration between computer scientists and social scientists to develop more robust and theoretically grounded approaches in emotion mining. By addressing these gaps, we aim to enhance the effectiveness and reliability of emotion mining methodologies, ultimately contributing to improved disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. Keywords: emotion mining, sentiment analysis, natural disasters, psychology, technological disasters

replace SmurfCat at PAN 2024 TextDetox: Alignment of Multilingual Transformers for Text Detoxification

Authors: Elisei Rykov, Konstantin Zaytsev, Ivan Anisimov, Alexandr Voronin

Abstract: This paper presents a solution for the Multilingual Text Detoxification task in the PAN-2024 competition of the SmurfCat team. Using data augmentation through machine translation and a special filtering procedure, we collected an additional multilingual parallel dataset for text detoxification. Using the obtained data, we fine-tuned several multilingual sequence-to-sequence models, such as mT0 and Aya, on a text detoxification task. We applied the ORPO alignment technique to the final model. Our final model has only 3.7 billion parameters and achieves state-of-the-art results for the Ukrainian language and near state-of-the-art results for other languages. In the competition, our team achieved first place in the automated evaluation with a score of 0.52 and second place in the final human evaluation with a score of 0.74.

replace FinCon: A Synthesized LLM Multi-Agent System with Conceptual Verbal Reinforcement for Enhanced Financial Decision Making

Authors: Yangyang Yu, Zhiyuan Yao, Haohang Li, Zhiyang Deng, Yupeng Cao, Zhi Chen, Jordan W. Suchow, Rong Liu, Zhenyu Cui, Denghui Zhang, Koduvayur Subbalakshmi, Guojun Xiong, Yueru He, Jimin Huang, Dong Li, Qianqian Xie

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable potential in conducting complex tasks and are increasingly utilized in various financial applications. However, high-quality sequential financial investment decision-making remains challenging. These tasks require multiple interactions with a volatile environment for every decision, demanding sufficient intelligence to maximize returns and manage risks. Although LLMs have been used to develop agent systems that surpass human teams and yield impressive investment returns, opportunities to enhance multi-sourced information synthesis and optimize decision-making outcomes through timely experience refinement remain unexplored. Here, we introduce the FinCon, an LLM-based multi-agent framework with CONceptual verbal reinforcement tailored for diverse FINancial tasks. Inspired by effective real-world investment firm organizational structures, FinCon utilizes a manager-analyst communication hierarchy. This structure allows for synchronized cross-functional agent collaboration towards unified goals through natural language interactions and equips each agent with greater memory capacity than humans. Additionally, a risk-control component in FinCon enhances decision quality by episodically initiating a self-critiquing mechanism to update systematic investment beliefs. The conceptualized beliefs serve as verbal reinforcement for the future agent's behavior and can be selectively propagated to the appropriate node that requires knowledge updates. This feature significantly improves performance while reducing unnecessary peer-to-peer communication costs. Moreover, FinCon demonstrates strong generalization capabilities in various financial tasks, including single stock trading and portfolio management.

replace Internet of Agents: Weaving a Web of Heterogeneous Agents for Collaborative Intelligence

Authors: Weize Chen, Ziming You, Ran Li, Yitong Guan, Chen Qian, Chenyang Zhao, Cheng Yang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has paved the way for the development of highly capable autonomous agents. However, existing multi-agent frameworks often struggle with integrating diverse capable third-party agents due to reliance on agents defined within their own ecosystems. They also face challenges in simulating distributed environments, as most frameworks are limited to single-device setups. Furthermore, these frameworks often rely on hard-coded communication pipelines, limiting their adaptability to dynamic task requirements. Inspired by the concept of the Internet, we propose the Internet of Agents (IoA), a novel framework that addresses these limitations by providing a flexible and scalable platform for LLM-based multi-agent collaboration. IoA introduces an agent integration protocol, an instant-messaging-like architecture design, and dynamic mechanisms for agent teaming and conversation flow control. Through extensive experiments on general assistant tasks, embodied AI tasks, and retrieval-augmented generation benchmarks, we demonstrate that IoA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, showcasing its ability to facilitate effective collaboration among heterogeneous agents. IoA represents a step towards linking diverse agents in an Internet-like environment, where agents can seamlessly collaborate to achieve greater intelligence and capabilities. Our codebase has been released at \url{https://github.com/OpenBMB/IoA}.

URLs: https://github.com/OpenBMB/IoA

replace-cross Agent Lumos: Unified and Modular Training for Open-Source Language Agents

Authors: Da Yin, Faeze Brahman, Abhilasha Ravichander, Khyathi Chandu, Kai-Wei Chang, Yejin Choi, Bill Yuchen Lin

Abstract: Closed-source agents suffer from several issues such as a lack of affordability, transparency, and reproducibility, particularly on complex interactive tasks. This motivates the development of open-source alternatives. We introduce LUMOS, one of the first frameworks for training open-source LLM-based agents. LUMOS features a learnable, unified, and modular architecture with a planning module that learns high-level subgoal generation, and a grounding module trained to translate these into actions using various tools in the execution module. The design allows for modular upgrades and wider applicability to diverse interactive tasks. To foster generalizable agent learning, we collect large-scale, unified, and high-quality training annotations derived from diverse ground-truth reasoning rationales across various complex interactive tasks. On 9 datasets, LUMOS exhibits several key advantages: (1) LUMOS excels multiple larger open-source agents on the held-out datasets (unused for training) for each task type. LUMOS even surpasses GPT agents on QA and web tasks; (2) LUMOS outperforms open-source agents produced by chain-of-thoughts and unmodularized integrated training; and (3) LUMOS effectively generalizes to unseen tasks, outperforming 33B-scale agents and domain-specific agents.

replace-cross Recursive Visual Programming

Authors: Jiaxin Ge, Sanjay Subramanian, Baifeng Shi, Roei Herzig, Trevor Darrell

Abstract: Visual Programming (VP) has emerged as a powerful framework for Visual Question Answering (VQA). By generating and executing bespoke code for each question, these methods demonstrate impressive compositional and reasoning capabilities, especially in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios. However, existing VP methods generate all code in a single function, resulting in code that is suboptimal in terms of both accuracy and interpretability. Inspired by human coding practices, we propose Recursive Visual Programming (RVP), which simplifies generated routines, provides more efficient problem solving, and can manage more complex data structures. RVP is inspired by human coding practices and approaches VQA tasks with an iterative recursive code generation approach, allowing decomposition of complicated problems into smaller parts. Notably, RVP is capable of dynamic type assignment, i.e., as the system recursively generates a new piece of code, it autonomously determines the appropriate return type and crafts the requisite code to generate that output. We show RVP's efficacy through extensive experiments on benchmarks including VSR, COVR, GQA, and NextQA, underscoring the value of adopting human-like recursive and modular programming techniques for solving VQA tasks through coding.

replace-cross The Ethics of Interaction: Mitigating Security Threats in LLMs

Authors: Ashutosh Kumar, Shiv Vignesh Murthy, Sagarika Singh, Swathy Ragupathy

Abstract: This paper comprehensively explores the ethical challenges arising from security threats to Large Language Models (LLMs). These intricate digital repositories are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, making them prime targets for attacks that can compromise their training data and the confidentiality of their data sources. The paper delves into the nuanced ethical repercussions of such security threats on society and individual privacy. We scrutinize five major threats--prompt injection, jailbreaking, Personal Identifiable Information (PII) exposure, sexually explicit content, and hate-based content--going beyond mere identification to assess their critical ethical consequences and the urgency they create for robust defensive strategies. The escalating reliance on LLMs underscores the crucial need for ensuring these systems operate within the bounds of ethical norms, particularly as their misuse can lead to significant societal and individual harm. We propose conceptualizing and developing an evaluative tool tailored for LLMs, which would serve a dual purpose: guiding developers and designers in preemptive fortification of backend systems and scrutinizing the ethical dimensions of LLM chatbot responses during the testing phase. By comparing LLM responses with those expected from humans in a moral context, we aim to discern the degree to which AI behaviors align with the ethical values held by a broader society. Ultimately, this paper not only underscores the ethical troubles presented by LLMs; it also highlights a path toward cultivating trust in these systems.

replace-cross Unlocking the Multi-modal Potential of CLIP for Generalized Category Discovery

Authors: Enguang Wang, Zhimao Peng, Zhengyuan Xie, Fei Yang, Xialei Liu, Ming-Ming Cheng

Abstract: Given unlabelled datasets containing both old and new categories, generalized category discovery (GCD) aims to accurately discover new classes while correctly classifying old classes, leveraging the class concepts learned from labeled samples. Current GCD methods only use a single visual modality of information, resulting in poor classification of visually similar classes. As a different modality, text information can provide complementary discriminative information, which motivates us to introduce it into the GCD task. However, the lack of class names for unlabelled data makes it impractical to utilize text information. To tackle this challenging problem, in this paper, we propose a Text Embedding Synthesizer (TES) to generate pseudo text embeddings for unlabelled samples. Specifically, our TES leverages the property that CLIP can generate aligned vision-language features, converting visual embeddings into tokens of the CLIP's text encoder to generate pseudo text embeddings. Besides, we employ a dual-branch framework, through the joint learning and instance consistency of different modality branches, visual and semantic information mutually enhance each other, promoting the interaction and fusion of visual and text knowledge. Our method unlocks the multi-modal potentials of CLIP and outperforms the baseline methods by a large margin on all GCD benchmarks, achieving new state-of-the-art. The code will be released at https://github.com/enguangW/GET .

URLs: https://github.com/enguangW/GET

replace-cross Vulnerability Detection with Code Language Models: How Far Are We?

Authors: Yangruibo Ding, Yanjun Fu, Omniyyah Ibrahim, Chawin Sitawarin, Xinyun Chen, Basel Alomair, David Wagner, Baishakhi Ray, Yizheng Chen

Abstract: In the context of the rising interest in code language models (code LMs) and vulnerability detection, we study the effectiveness of code LMs for detecting vulnerabilities. Our analysis reveals significant shortcomings in existing vulnerability datasets, including poor data quality, low label accuracy, and high duplication rates, leading to unreliable model performance in realistic vulnerability detection scenarios. Additionally, the evaluation methods used with these datasets are not representative of real-world vulnerability detection. To address these challenges, we introduce PrimeVul, a new dataset for training and evaluating code LMs for vulnerability detection. PrimeVul incorporates a novel set of data labeling techniques that achieve comparable label accuracy to human-verified benchmarks while significantly expanding the dataset. It also implements a rigorous data de-duplication and chronological data splitting strategy to mitigate data leakage issues, alongside introducing more realistic evaluation metrics and settings. This comprehensive approach aims to provide a more accurate assessment of code LMs' performance in real-world conditions. Evaluating code LMs on PrimeVul reveals that existing benchmarks significantly overestimate the performance of these models. For instance, a state-of-the-art 7B model scored 68.26% F1 on BigVul but only 3.09% F1 on PrimeVul. Attempts to improve performance through advanced training techniques and larger models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 were unsuccessful, with results akin to random guessing in the most stringent settings. These findings underscore the considerable gap between current capabilities and the practical requirements for deploying code LMs in security roles, highlighting the need for more innovative research in this domain.

replace-cross PANGeA: Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI for Turn-Based Video Games

Authors: Steph Buongiorno, Lawrence Jake Klinkert, Tanishq Chawla, Zixin Zhuang, Corey Clark

Abstract: This research introduces Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI (PANGeA), a structured approach for leveraging large language models (LLMs), guided by a game designer's high-level criteria, to generate narrative content for turn-based role-playing video games (RPGs). Distinct from prior applications of LLMs used for video game design, PANGeA innovates by not only generating game level data (which includes, but is not limited to, setting, key items, and non-playable characters (NPCs)), but by also fostering dynamic, free-form interactions between the player and the environment that align with the procedural game narrative. The NPCs generated by PANGeA are personality-biased and express traits from the Big 5 Personality Model in their generated responses. PANGeA addresses challenges behind ingesting free-form text input, which can prompt LLM responses beyond the scope of the game narrative. A novel validation system that uses the LLM's intelligence evaluates text input and aligns generated responses with the unfolding narrative. Making these interactions possible, PANGeA is supported by a server that hosts a custom memory system that supplies context for augmenting generated responses thus aligning them with the procedural narrative. For its broad application, the server has a REST interface enabling any game engine to integrate directly with PANGeA, as well as an LLM interface adaptable with local or private LLMs. PANGeA's ability to foster dynamic narrative generation by aligning responses with the procedural narrative is demonstrated through an empirical study and ablation test of two versions of a demo game. These are, a custom, browser-based GPT and a Unity demo. As the results show, PANGeA holds potential to assist game designers in using LLMs to generate narrative-consistent content even when provided varied and unpredictable, free-form text input.

replace-cross Large Language Model in Financial Regulatory Interpretation

Authors: Zhiyu Cao, Zachary Feinstein

Abstract: This study explores the innovative use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as analytical tools for interpreting complex financial regulations. The primary objective is to design effective prompts that guide LLMs in distilling verbose and intricate regulatory texts, such as the Basel III capital requirement regulations, into a concise mathematical framework that can be subsequently translated into actionable code. This novel approach aims to streamline the implementation of regulatory mandates within the financial reporting and risk management systems of global banking institutions. A case study was conducted to assess the performance of various LLMs, demonstrating that GPT-4 outperforms other models in processing and collecting necessary information, as well as executing mathematical calculations. The case study utilized numerical simulations with asset holdings -- including fixed income, equities, currency pairs, and commodities -- to demonstrate how LLMs can effectively implement the Basel III capital adequacy requirements. Keywords: Large Language Models, Prompt Engineering, LLMs in Finance, Basel III, Minimum Capital Requirements, LLM Ethics

replace-cross MediSyn: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Broad Medical 2D and 3D Image Synthesis

Authors: Joseph Cho, Cyril Zakka, Dhamanpreet Kaur, Rohan Shad, Ross Wightman, Akshay Chaudhari, William Hiesinger

Abstract: Diffusion models have recently gained significant traction due to their ability to generate high-fidelity and diverse images and videos conditioned on text prompts. In medicine, this application promises to address the critical challenge of data scarcity, a consequence of barriers in data sharing, stringent patient privacy regulations, and disparities in patient population and demographics. By generating realistic and varying medical 2D and 3D images, these models offer a rich, privacy-respecting resource for algorithmic training and research. To this end, we introduce MediSyn, a pair of instruction-tuned text-guided latent diffusion models with the ability to generate high-fidelity and diverse medical 2D and 3D images across specialties and modalities. Through established metrics, we show significant improvement in broad medical image and video synthesis guided by text prompts.

replace-cross STAR: SocioTechnical Approach to Red Teaming Language Models

Authors: Laura Weidinger, John Mellor, Bernat Guillen Pegueroles, Nahema Marchal, Ravin Kumar, Kristian Lum, Canfer Akbulut, Mark Diaz, Stevie Bergman, Mikel Rodriguez, Verena Rieser, William Isaac

Abstract: This research introduces STAR, a sociotechnical framework that improves on current best practices for red teaming safety of large language models. STAR makes two key contributions: it enhances steerability by generating parameterised instructions for human red teamers, leading to improved coverage of the risk surface. Parameterised instructions also provide more detailed insights into model failures at no increased cost. Second, STAR improves signal quality by matching demographics to assess harms for specific groups, resulting in more sensitive annotations. STAR further employs a novel step of arbitration to leverage diverse viewpoints and improve label reliability, treating disagreement not as noise but as a valuable contribution to signal quality.

replace-cross MMLongBench-Doc: Benchmarking Long-context Document Understanding with Visualizations

Authors: Yubo Ma, Yuhang Zang, Liangyu Chen, Meiqi Chen, Yizhu Jiao, Xinze Li, Xinyuan Lu, Ziyu Liu, Yan Ma, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Liangming Pan, Yu-Gang Jiang, Jiaqi Wang, Yixin Cao, Aixin Sun

Abstract: Understanding documents with rich layouts and multi-modal components is a long-standing and practical task. Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable strides in various tasks, particularly in single-page document understanding (DU). However, their abilities on long-context DU remain an open problem. This work presents MMLongBench-Doc, a long-context, multi-modal benchmark comprising 1,062 expert-annotated questions. Distinct from previous datasets, it is constructed upon 130 lengthy PDF-formatted documents with an average of 49.4 pages and 20,971 textual tokens. Towards comprehensive evaluation, answers to these questions rely on pieces of evidence from (1) different sources (text, image, chart, table, and layout structure) and (2) various locations (i.e. page number). Moreover, 33.2% of the questions are cross-page questions requiring evidence across multiple pages. 22.8% of the questions are designed to be unanswerable for detecting potential hallucinations. Experiments on 14 LVLMs demonstrate that long-context DU greatly challenges current models. Notably, the best-performing model, GPT-4o, achieves an F1 score of only 42.7%, while the second-best, GPT-4V, scores 31.4%. Furthermore, 12 LVLMs (all except GPT-4o and GPT-4V) even present worse performance than their LLM counterparts which are fed with lossy-parsed OCR documents. These results validate the necessity of future research toward more capable long-context LVLMs. Project Page: https://mayubo2333.github.io/MMLongBench-Doc

URLs: https://mayubo2333.github.io/MMLongBench-Doc

replace-cross SBoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation with Regional Weight Updates

Authors: Lai-Man Po, Yuyang Liu, Haoxuan Wu, Tianqi Zhang, Wing-Yin Yu, Zeyu Jiang, Kun Li

Abstract: This paper introduces Standard Basis LoRA (SBoRA), a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach for Large Language Models that builds upon the pioneering works of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Orthogonal Adaptation. SBoRA further reduces the computational and memory requirements of LoRA while enhancing learning performance. By leveraging orthogonal standard basis vectors to initialize one of the low-rank matrices, either A or B, SBoRA enables regional weight updates and memory-efficient fine-tuning. This approach gives rise to two variants, SBoRA-FA and SBoRA-FB, where only one of the matrices is updated, resulting in a sparse update matrix with a majority of zero rows or columns. Consequently, the majority of the fine-tuned model's weights remain unchanged from the pre-trained weights. This characteristic of SBoRA, wherein regional weight updates occur, is reminiscent of the modular organization of the human brain, which efficiently adapts to new tasks. Our empirical results demonstrate the superiority of SBoRA-FA over LoRA in various fine-tuning tasks, including commonsense reasoning and arithmetic reasoning. Furthermore, we evaluate the effectiveness of QSBoRA on quantized LLaMA models of varying scales, highlighting its potential for efficient adaptation to new tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/cityuhkai/SBoRA

URLs: https://github.com/cityuhkai/SBoRA

replace-cross Entropy Law: The Story Behind Data Compression and LLM Performance

Authors: Mingjia Yin, Chuhan Wu, Yufei Wang, Hao Wang, Wei Guo, Yasheng Wang, Yong Liu, Ruiming Tang, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Data is the cornerstone of large language models (LLMs), but not all data is useful for model learning. Carefully selected data can better elicit the capabilities of LLMs with much less computational overhead. Most methods concentrate on evaluating the quality of individual samples in data selection, while the combinatorial effects among samples are neglected. Even if each sample is of perfect quality, their combinations may be suboptimal in teaching LLMs due to their intrinsic homogeneity or contradiction. In this paper, we aim to uncover the underlying relationships between LLM performance and data selection. Inspired by the information compression nature of LLMs, we uncover an ``entropy law'' that connects LLM performance with data compression ratio and first-epoch training loss, which reflect the information redundancy of a dataset and the mastery of inherent knowledge encoded in this dataset, respectively. Through both theoretical deduction and empirical evaluation, we find that model performance is negatively correlated to the compression ratio of training data, which usually yields a lower training loss. Based on the findings of the entropy law, we propose a quite efficient and universal data selection method named \textbf{ZIP} for training LLMs, which aim to prioritize data subsets exhibiting a low compression ratio. Based on a multi-stage algorithm that selects diverse data in a greedy manner, we can obtain a good data subset with satisfactory diversity. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the entropy law and the superiority of ZIP across different LLM backbones and alignment stages. We also present an interesting application of entropy law that can detect potential performance risks at the beginning of model training.