Authors: Kartik Sharma, Peeyush Kumar, Yunqing Li
Abstract: This paper presents OG-RAG, an Ontology-Grounded Retrieval Augmented Generation method designed to enhance LLM-generated responses by anchoring retrieval processes in domain-specific ontologies. While LLMs are widely used for tasks like question answering and search, they struggle to adapt to specialized knowledge, such as industrial workflows or knowledge work, without expensive fine-tuning or sub-optimal retrieval methods. Existing retrieval-augmented models, such as RAG, offer improvements but fail to account for structured domain knowledge, leading to suboptimal context generation. Ontologies, which conceptually organize domain knowledge by defining entities and their interrelationships, offer a structured representation to address this gap. OG-RAG constructs a hypergraph representation of domain documents, where each hyperedge encapsulates clusters of factual knowledge grounded using domain-specific ontology. An optimization algorithm then retrieves the minimal set of hyperedges that constructs a precise, conceptually grounded context for the LLM. This method enables efficient retrieval while preserving the complex relationships between entities. OG-RAG applies to domains where fact-based reasoning is essential, particularly in tasks that require workflows or decision-making steps to follow predefined rules and procedures. These include industrial workflows in healthcare, legal, and agricultural sectors, as well as knowledge-driven tasks such as news journalism, investigative research, consulting and more. Our evaluations demonstrate that OG-RAG increases the recall of accurate facts by 55% and improves response correctness by 40% across four different LLMs. Additionally, OG-RAG enables 30% faster attribution of responses to context and boosts fact-based reasoning accuracy by 27% compared to baseline methods.
Authors: Lulu Zhao, Weihao Zeng, Xiaofeng Shi, Hua Zhou
Abstract: Recently, both closed-source LLMs and open-source communities have made significant strides, outperforming humans in various general domains. However, their performance in specific professional domains such as medicine, especially within the open-source community, remains suboptimal due to the complexity of medical knowledge. In this paper, we propose CareBot, a bilingual medical LLM, which leverages a comprehensive approach integrating continuous pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). Our novel two-stage CPT method, comprising Stable CPT and Boost CPT, effectively bridges the gap between general and domain-specific data, facilitating a smooth transition from pre-training to fine-tuning and enhancing domain knowledge progressively. We also introduce DataRater, a model designed to assess data quality during CPT, ensuring that the training data is both accurate and relevant. For SFT, we develope a large and diverse bilingual dataset, along with ConFilter, a metric to enhance multi-turn dialogue quality, which is crucial to improving the model's ability to handle more complex dialogues. The combination of high-quality data sources and innovative techniques significantly improves CareBot's performance across a range of medical applications. Our rigorous evaluations on Chinese and English benchmarks confirm CareBot's effectiveness in medical consultation and education. These advancements not only address current limitations in medical LLMs but also set a new standard for developing effective and reliable open-source models in the medical domain. We will open-source the datasets and models later, contributing valuable resources to the research community.
Authors: Gregory Kang Ruey Lau, Wenyang Hu, Diwen Liu, Jizhuo Chen, See-Kiong Ng, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
Abstract: Large Language Models still encounter substantial challenges in reasoning tasks, especially for smaller models, which many users may be restricted to due to resource constraints (e.g. GPU memory restrictions). Inference-time methods to boost LLM performance, such as prompting methods to invoke certain reasoning pathways in responses, have been shown effective in past works, though they largely rely on sequential queries. The ensemble method, which consists of multiple constituent models running in parallel, is a promising approach to achieving better inference-time performance, especially given recent developments that enabled significant speed-ups in LLM batch inference. In this work, we propose a novel, training-free LLM ensemble framework where a single LLM model is fed an optimized, diverse set of prompts in parallel, effectively producing an ensemble at inference time to achieve performance improvement in reasoning tasks. We empirically demonstrate that our method leads to significant gains on math reasoning tasks, e.g., on MATH, where our ensemble consisting of a few small models (e.g., three Qwen2-MATH-1.5B-it models) can outperform a larger model (e.g., Qwen2-MATH-7B-it).
Authors: Hortense Fong, George Gui
Abstract: Understanding when and why consumers engage with stories is crucial for content creators and platforms. While existing theories suggest that audience beliefs of what is going to happen should play an important role in engagement decisions, empirical work has mostly focused on developing techniques to directly extract features from actual content, rather than capturing forward-looking beliefs, due to the lack of a principled way to model such beliefs in unstructured narrative data. To complement existing feature extraction techniques, this paper introduces a novel framework that leverages large language models to model audience forward-looking beliefs about how stories might unfold. Our method generates multiple potential continuations for each story and extracts features related to expectations, uncertainty, and surprise using established content analysis techniques. Applying our method to over 30,000 book chapters from Wattpad, we demonstrate that our framework complements existing feature engineering techniques by amplifying their marginal explanatory power on average by 31%. The results reveal that different types of engagement-continuing to read, commenting, and voting-are driven by distinct combinations of current and anticipated content features. Our framework provides a novel way to study and explore how audience forward-looking beliefs shape their engagement with narrative media, with implications for marketing strategy in content-focused industries.
Authors: Jiacheng Liu, Yuanchun Li, Liangyan Li, Yi Sun, Hao Wen, Xiangyu Li, Yao Guo, Yunxin Liu
Abstract: Many applications demand context sensing to offer personalized and timely services. Yet, developing sensing programs can be challenging for developers and using them is privacy-concerning for end-users. In this paper, we propose to use natural language as the unified interface to process personal data and sense user context, which can effectively ease app development and make the data pipeline more transparent. Our work is inspired by large language models (LLMs) and other generative models, while directly applying them does not solve the problem - letting the model directly process the data cannot handle complex sensing requests and letting the model write the data processing program suffers error-prone code generation. We address the problem with 1) a unified data processing framework that makes context-sensing programs simpler and 2) a feedback-guided query optimizer that makes data query more informative. To evaluate the performance of natural language-based context sensing, we create a benchmark that contains 133 context sensing tasks. Extensive evaluation has shown that our approach is able to automatically solve the context-sensing tasks efficiently and precisely. The code is opensourced at https://github.com/MobileLLM/ChainStream.
Authors: Samarth Goel, Reagan J. Lee, Kannan Ramchandran
Abstract: Embedding models are crucial for tasks in Information Retrieval (IR) and semantic similarity measurement, yet their handling of longer texts and associated positional biases remains underexplored. In this study, we investigate the impact of content position and input size on text embeddings. Our experiments reveal that embedding models, irrespective of their positional encoding mechanisms, disproportionately prioritize the beginning of an input. Ablation studies demonstrate that insertion of irrelevant text or removal at the start of a document reduces cosine similarity between altered and original embeddings by up to 12.3\% more than ablations at the end. Regression analysis further confirms this bias, with sentence importance declining as position moves further from the start, even with with content-agnosticity. We hypothesize that this effect arises from pre-processing strategies and chosen positional encoding techniques. These findings quantify the sensitivity of retrieval systems and suggest a new lens towards embedding model robustness.
Authors: Robert Wasenm\"uller, Kevin Hilbert, Christoph Benzm\"uller
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-Powered Conversational Agents have the potential to provide users with scaled behavioral healthcare support, and potentially even deliver full-scale "AI therapy'" in the future. While such agents can already conduct fluent and proactive emotional support conversations, they inherently lack the ability to (a) consistently and reliably act by predefined rules to align their conversation with an overarching therapeutic concept and (b) make their decision paths inspectable for risk management and clinical evaluation -- both essential requirements for an "AI Therapist". In this work, we introduce a novel paradigm for dialog policy planning in conversational agents enabling them to (a) act according to an expert-written "script" that outlines the therapeutic approach and (b) explicitly transition through a finite set of states over the course of the conversation. The script acts as a deterministic component, constraining the LLM's behavior in desirable ways and establishing a basic architecture for an AI Therapist. We implement two variants of Script-Based Dialog Policy Planning using different prompting techniques and synthesize a total of 100 conversations with LLM-simulated patients. The results demonstrate the feasibility of this new technology and provide insights into the efficiency and effectiveness of different implementation variants.
Authors: Shuo Xie, Fangzhi Zhu, Jiahui Wang, Lulu Wen, Wei Dai, Xiaowei Chen, Junxiong Zhu, Kai Zhou, Bo Zheng
Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human feedback is crucial for their development. Existing preference optimization methods such as DPO and KTO, while improved based on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are inherently derived from PPO, requiring a reference model that adds GPU memory resources and relies heavily on abundant preference data. Meanwhile, current preference optimization research mainly targets single-question scenarios with two replies, neglecting optimization with multiple replies, which leads to a waste of data in the application. This study introduces the MPPO algorithm, which leverages the average likelihood of model responses to fit the reward function and maximizes the utilization of preference data. Through a comparison of Point-wise, Pair-wise, and List-wise implementations, we found that the Pair-wise approach achieves the best performance, significantly enhancing the quality of model responses. Experimental results demonstrate MPPO's outstanding performance across various benchmarks. On MT-Bench, MPPO outperforms DPO, ORPO, and SimPO. Notably, on Arena-Hard, MPPO surpasses DPO and ORPO by substantial margins. These achievements underscore the remarkable advantages of MPPO in preference optimization tasks.
Authors: Derrick Quinn, Mohammad Nouri, Neel Patel, John Salihu, Alireza Salemi, Sukhan Lee, Hamed Zamani, Mohammad Alian
Abstract: An evolving solution to address hallucination and enhance accuracy in large language models (LLMs) is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which involves augmenting LLMs with information retrieved from an external knowledge source, such as the web. This paper profiles several RAG execution pipelines and demystifies the complex interplay between their retrieval and generation phases. We demonstrate that while exact retrieval schemes are expensive, they can reduce inference time compared to approximate retrieval variants because an exact retrieval model can send a smaller but more accurate list of documents to the generative model while maintaining the same end-to-end accuracy. This observation motivates the acceleration of the exact nearest neighbor search for RAG. In this work, we design Intelligent Knowledge Store (IKS), a type-2 CXL device that implements a scale-out near-memory acceleration architecture with a novel cache-coherent interface between the host CPU and near-memory accelerators. IKS offers 13.4-27.9x faster exact nearest neighbor search over a 512GB vector database compared with executing the search on Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs. This higher search performance translates to 1.7-26.3x lower end-to-end inference time for representative RAG applications. IKS is inherently a memory expander; its internal DRAM can be disaggregated and used for other applications running on the server to prevent DRAM, which is the most expensive component in today's servers, from being stranded.
Authors: Fouad Trad, Ryan Yammine, Jana Charafeddine, Marlene Chakhtoura, Maya Rahme, Ghada El-Hajj Fuleihan, Ali Chehab
Abstract: Systematic reviews (SRs) are essential for evidence-based guidelines but are often limited by the time-consuming nature of literature screening. We propose and evaluate an in-house system based on Large Language Models (LLMs) for automating both title/abstract and full-text screening, addressing a critical gap in the literature. Using a completed SR on Vitamin D and falls (14,439 articles), the LLM-based system employed prompt engineering for title/abstract screening and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for full-text screening. The system achieved an article exclusion rate (AER) of 99.5%, specificity of 99.6%, a false negative rate (FNR) of 0%, and a negative predictive value (NPV) of 100%. After screening, only 78 articles required manual review, including all 20 identified by traditional methods, reducing manual screening time by 95.5%. For comparison, Rayyan, a commercial tool for title/abstract screening, achieved an AER of 72.1% and FNR of 5% when including articles Rayyan considered as undecided or likely to include. Lowering Rayyan's inclusion thresholds improved FNR to 0% but increased screening time. By addressing both screening phases, the LLM-based system significantly outperformed Rayyan and traditional methods, reducing total screening time to 25.5 hours while maintaining high accuracy. These findings highlight the transformative potential of LLMs in SR workflows by offering a scalable, efficient, and accurate solution, particularly for the full-text screening phase, which has lacked automation tools.
Authors: Harshvivek Kashid, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Abstract: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology has revolutionized the digitization of printed text, enabling efficient data extraction and analysis across various domains. Just like Machine Translation systems, OCR systems are prone to errors. In this work, we address the challenge of data generation and post-OCR error correction, specifically for low-resource languages. We propose an approach for synthetic data generation for Devanagari languages, RoundTripOCR, that tackles the scarcity of the post-OCR Error Correction datasets for low-resource languages. We release post-OCR text correction datasets for Hindi, Marathi, Bodo, Nepali, Konkani and Sanskrit. We also present a novel approach for OCR error correction by leveraging techniques from machine translation. Our method involves translating erroneous OCR output into a corrected form by treating the OCR errors as mistranslations in a parallel text corpus, employing pre-trained transformer models to learn the mapping from erroneous to correct text pairs, effectively correcting OCR errors.
Authors: Shubham Agarwal, Gaurav Sahu, Abhay Puri, Issam H. Laradji, Krishnamurthy DJ Dvijotham, Jason Stanley, Laurent Charlin, Christopher Pal
Abstract: Literature reviews are an essential component of scientific research, but they remain time-intensive and challenging to write, especially due to the recent influx of research papers. This paper explores the zero-shot abilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) in assisting with the writing of literature reviews based on an abstract. We decompose the task into two components: 1. Retrieving related works given a query abstract, and 2. Writing a literature review based on the retrieved results. We analyze how effective LLMs are for both components. For retrieval, we introduce a novel two-step search strategy that first uses an LLM to extract meaningful keywords from the abstract of a paper and then retrieves potentially relevant papers by querying an external knowledge base. Additionally, we study a prompting-based re-ranking mechanism with attribution and show that re-ranking doubles the normalized recall compared to naive search methods, while providing insights into the LLM's decision-making process. In the generation phase, we propose a two-step approach that first outlines a plan for the review and then executes steps in the plan to generate the actual review. To evaluate different LLM-based literature review methods, we create test sets from arXiv papers using a protocol designed for rolling use with newly released LLMs to avoid test set contamination in zero-shot evaluations. We release this evaluation protocol to promote additional research and development in this regard. Our empirical results suggest that LLMs show promising potential for writing literature reviews when the task is decomposed into smaller components of retrieval and planning. Further, we demonstrate that our planning-based approach achieves higher-quality reviews by minimizing hallucinated references in the generated review by 18-26% compared to existing simpler LLM-based generation methods.
Authors: Chowdhury Mofizur Rahman, Mahbub E Sobhani, Anika Tasnim Rodela, Swakkhar Shatabda
Abstract: Text compression shrinks textual data while keeping crucial information, eradicating constraints on storage, bandwidth, and computational efficacy. The integration of lossless compression techniques with transformer-based text decompression has received negligible attention, despite the increasing volume of English text data in communication. The primary barrier in advancing text compression and restoration involves optimizing transformer-based approaches with efficient pre-processing and integrating lossless compression algorithms, that remained unresolved in the prior attempts. Here, we propose a transformer-based method named RejuvenateForme for text decompression, addressing prior issues by harnessing a new pre-processing technique and a lossless compression method. Our meticulous pre-processing technique incorporating the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm achieves compression ratios of 12.57, 13.38, and 11.42 on the BookCorpus, EN-DE, and EN-FR corpora, thus showing state-of-the-art compression ratios compared to other deep learning and traditional approaches. Furthermore, the RejuvenateForme achieves a BLEU score of 27.31, 25.78, and 50.45 on the EN-DE, EN-FR, and BookCorpus corpora, showcasing its comprehensive efficacy. In contrast, the pre-trained T5-Small exhibits better performance over prior state-of-the-art models.
Authors: Gorden Liu, Yu Sun, Ruixiao Sun, Xin Dong, Hongyu Xiong
Abstract: The advanced processing and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have driven substantial progress in vision-language (VL) understanding tasks. However, while effective for tasks governed by straightforward logic, MLLMs often encounter challenges when reasoning over complex, interdependent logic structures. To address this limitation, we introduce \textit{AgentPS}, a novel framework that integrates Agentic Process Supervision into MLLMs via multi-round question answering during fine-tuning. \textit{AgentPS} demonstrates significant performance improvements over baseline MLLMs on proprietary TikTok datasets, due to its integration of process supervision and structured sequential reasoning. Furthermore, we show that replacing human-annotated labels with LLM-generated labels retains much of the performance gain, highlighting the framework's practical scalability in industrial applications. These results position \textit{AgentPS} as a highly effective and efficient architecture for multimodal classification tasks. Its adaptability and scalability, especially when enhanced by automated annotation generation, make it a powerful tool for handling large-scale, real-world challenges.
Authors: Abdulhady Abas Abdullah, Srwa Hasan Abdulla, Dalia Mohammad Toufiq, Halgurd S. Maghdid, Tarik A. Rashid, Pakshan F. Farho, Shadan Sh. Sabr, Akar H. Taher, Darya S. Hamad, Hadi Veisi, Aras T. Asaad
Abstract: Nowadays, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an important tool for most people's daily life routines, ranging from understanding speech, translation, named entity recognition (NER), and text categorization, to generative text models such as ChatGPT. Due to the existence of big data and consequently large corpora for widely used languages like English, Spanish, Turkish, Persian, and many more, these applications have been developed accurately. However, the Kurdish language still requires more corpora and large datasets to be included in NLP applications. This is because Kurdish has a rich linguistic structure, varied dialects, and a limited dataset, which poses unique challenges for Kurdish NLP (KNLP) application development. While several studies have been conducted in KNLP for various applications, Kurdish NER (KNER) remains a challenge for many KNLP tasks, including text analysis and classification. In this work, we address this limitation by proposing a methodology for fine-tuning the pre-trained RoBERTa model for KNER. To this end, we first create a Kurdish corpus, followed by designing a modified model architecture and implementing the training procedures. To evaluate the trained model, a set of experiments is conducted to demonstrate the performance of the KNER model using different tokenization methods and trained models. The experimental results show that fine-tuned RoBERTa with the SentencePiece tokenization method substantially improves KNER performance, achieving a 12.8% improvement in F1-score compared to traditional models, and consequently establishes a new benchmark for KNLP.
Authors: Andrea Cristina McGlinchey, Peter J Barclay
Abstract: Following the universal availability of generative AI systems with the release of ChatGPT, automatic detection of deceptive text created by Large Language Models has focused on domains such as academic plagiarism and "fake news". However, generative AI also poses a threat to the livelihood of creative writers, and perhaps to literary culture in general, through reduction in quality of published material. Training a Large Language Model on writers' output to generate "sham books" in a particular style seems to constitute a new form of plagiarism. This problem has been little researched. In this study, we trained Machine Learning classifier models to distinguish short samples of human-written from machine-generated creative fiction, focusing on classic detective novels. Our results show that a Naive Bayes and a Multi-Layer Perceptron classifier achieved a high degree of success (accuracy > 95%), significantly outperforming human judges (accuracy < 55%). This approach worked well with short text samples (around 100 words), which previous research has shown to be difficult to classify. We have deployed an online proof-of-concept classifier tool, AI Detective, as a first step towards developing lightweight and reliable applications for use by editors and publishers, with the aim of protecting the economic and cultural contribution of human authors.
Authors: Ali Hamdi, Hozaifa Kassab, Mohamed Bahaa, Marwa Mohamed
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing, excelling in areas like text generation, summarization, and question-answering. Despite their capabilities, these models face challenges when fine-tuned on small, domain-specific datasets, often struggling to generalize and deliver accurate results with unfamiliar inputs. To tackle this issue, we introduce RIRO, a novel two-layer architecture designed to improve performance in data-scarce environments. The first layer leverages advanced prompt engineering to reformulate inputs, ensuring better alignment with training data, while the second layer focuses on refining outputs to minimize inconsistencies. Through fine-tuning models like Phi-2, Falcon 7B, and Falcon 1B, with Phi-2 outperforming the others. Additionally, we introduce a benchmark using evaluation metrics such as cosine similarity, Levenshtein distance, BLEU score, ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L. While these advancements improve performance, challenges like computational demands and overfitting persist, limiting the potential of LLMs in data-scarce, high-stakes environments such as healthcare, legal documentation, and software testing.
Authors: Jonibek Mansurov, Akhmed Sakip, Alham Fikri Aji
Abstract: In this paper, we show that knowledge distillation can be subverted to manipulate language model benchmark scores, revealing a critical vulnerability in current evaluation practices. We introduce "Data Laundering," a three-phase process analogous to financial money laundering, that enables the covert transfer of benchmark-specific knowledge through seemingly legitimate intermediate training steps. Through extensive experiments with a 2-layer BERT student model, we show how this approach can achieve substantial improvements in benchmark accuracy (up to 75\% on GPQA) without developing genuine reasoning capabilities. Notably, this method can be exploited intentionally or even unintentionally, as researchers may inadvertently adopt this method that inflates scores using knowledge distillation without realizing the implications. While our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique, we present them as a cautionary tale highlighting the urgent need for more robust evaluation methods in AI. This work aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion about evaluation integrity in AI development and the need for benchmarks that more accurately reflect true model capabilities. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/data_laundering}.
Authors: Edward Kim, Manil Shrestha, Richard Foty, Tom DeLay, Vicki Seyfert-Margolis
Abstract: Creation and curation of knowledge graphs can accelerate disease discovery and analysis in real-world data. While disease ontologies aid in biological data annotation, codified categories (SNOMED-CT, ICD10, CPT) may not capture patient condition nuances or rare diseases. Multiple disease definitions across data sources complicate ontology mapping and disease clustering. We propose creating patient knowledge graphs using large language model extraction techniques, allowing data extraction via natural language rather than rigid ontological hierarchies. Our method maps to existing ontologies (MeSH, SNOMED-CT, RxNORM, HPO) to ground extracted entities. Using a large ambulatory care EHR database with 33.6M patients, we demonstrate our method through the patient search for Dravet syndrome, which received ICD10 recognition in October 2020. We describe our construction of patient-specific knowledge graphs and symptom-based patient searches. Using confirmed Dravet syndrome ICD10 codes as ground truth, we employ LLM-based entity extraction to characterize patients in grounded ontologies. We then apply this method to identify Beta-propeller protein-associated neurodegeneration (BPAN) patients, demonstrating real-world discovery where no ground truth exists.
Authors: Marjolaine Ray (Lattice), Qi Wang (Lattice), Fr\'ed\'erique M\'elanie-Becquet (Lattice), Thierry Poibeau (Lattice), B\'eatrice Mazoyer (m\'edialab)
Abstract: Event detection in text streams is a crucial task for the analysis of online media and social networks. One of the current challenges in this field is establishing a performance standard while maintaining an acceptable level of computational complexity. In our study, we use an incremental clustering algorithm combined with recent advancements in sentence embeddings. Our objective is to compare our findings with previous studies, specifically those by Cao et al. (2024) and Mazoyer et al. (2020). Our results demonstrate significant improvements and could serve as a relevant baseline for future research in this area.
Authors: Salman Faroz
Abstract: The medical domain is vast and diverse, with many existing embedding models focused on general healthcare applications. However, these models often struggle to capture a deep understanding of diseases due to their broad generalization across the entire medical field. To address this gap, I present DisEmbed, a disease-focused embedding model. DisEmbed is trained on a synthetic dataset specifically curated to include disease descriptions, symptoms, and disease-related Q\&A pairs, making it uniquely suited for disease-related tasks. For evaluation, I benchmarked DisEmbed against existing medical models using disease-specific datasets and the triplet evaluation method. My results demonstrate that DisEmbed outperforms other models, particularly in identifying disease-related contexts and distinguishing between similar diseases. This makes DisEmbed highly valuable for disease-specific use cases, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tasks, where its performance is particularly robust.
Authors: Fatima AlGhamdi, Reem Mohammed, Hend Al-Khalifa, Areeb Alowisheq
Abstract: This paper introduces GLARE an Arabic Apps Reviews dataset collected from Saudi Google PlayStore. It consists of 76M reviews, 69M of which are Arabic reviews of 9,980 Android Applications. We present the data collection methodology, along with a detailed Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) and Feature Engineering on the gathered reviews. We also highlight possible use cases and benefits of the dataset.
Authors: Hannes Westermann, Jaromir Savelka
Abstract: Interacting with the legal system and the government requires the assembly and analysis of various pieces of information that can be spread across different (paper) documents, such as forms, certificates and contracts (e.g. leases). This information is required in order to understand one's legal rights, as well as to fill out forms to file claims in court or obtain government benefits. However, finding the right information, locating the correct forms and filling them out can be challenging for laypeople. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful technology that has the potential to address this gap, but still rely on the user to provide the correct information, which may be challenging and error-prone if the information is only available in complex paper documents. We present an investigation into utilizing multi-modal LLMs to analyze images of handwritten paper forms, in order to automatically extract relevant information in a structured format. Our initial results are promising, but reveal some limitations (e.g., when the image quality is low). Our work demonstrates the potential of integrating multi-modal LLMs to support laypeople and self-represented litigants in finding and assembling relevant information.
Authors: Arnau Perez, Xavier Vizcaino
Abstract: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems struggle with processing multimodal documents of varying structural complexity. This paper introduces a novel multi-strategy parsing approach using LLM-powered OCR to extract content from diverse document types, including presentations and high text density files both scanned or not. The methodology employs a node-based extraction technique that creates relationships between different information types and generates context-aware metadata. By implementing a Multimodal Assembler Agent and a flexible embedding strategy, the system enhances document comprehension and retrieval capabilities. Experimental evaluations across multiple knowledge bases demonstrate the approach's effectiveness, showing improvements in answer relevancy and information faithfulness.
Authors: Felipe Jos\'e D. Sousa, Sarah P. Cerqueira, Jo\~ao Queiroz, Angelo Loula
Abstract: The computational generation of poems is a complex task, which involves several sound, prosodic and rhythmic resources. In this work we present PROPOE 2, with the extension of structural and rhythmic possibilities compared to the original system, generating poems from metered sentences extracted from the prose of Brazilian literature, with multiple rhythmic assembly criteria. These advances allow for a more coherent exploration of rhythms and sound effects for the poem. Results of poems generated by the system are demonstrated, with variations in parameters to exemplify generation and evaluation using various criteria. A gera\c{c}\~ao computacional de poemas \'e uma tarefa complexa, que envolve diversos recursos sonoros, pros\'odicos e r\'itmicos. Neste trabalho apresentamos PROPOE 2, com a amplia\c{c}\~ao de possibilidades estruturais e r\'itmicas em rela\c{c}\~ao ao sistema original, gerando poemas a partir de senten\c{c}as metrificadas extra\'idas da prosa da literatura brasileira, com m\'ultiplos crit\'erios r\'itmicos de montagem. Esses avan\c{c}os permitem uma explora\c{c}\~ao mais coerente de ritmos e efeitos sonoros para o poema. Resultados de poemas gerados pelo sistema s\~ao demonstrados, com varia\c{c}\~oes de par\^ametros para exemplificar a gera\c{c}\~ao e a avalia\c{c}\~ao pelos variados crit\'erios.
Authors: Romain Hardy, Sung Eun Kim, Pranav Rajpurkar
Abstract: The increasing adoption of AI-generated radiology reports necessitates robust methods for detecting hallucinations--false or unfounded statements that could impact patient care. We present ReXTrust, a novel framework for fine-grained hallucination detection in AI-generated radiology reports. Our approach leverages sequences of hidden states from large vision-language models to produce finding-level hallucination risk scores. We evaluate ReXTrust on a subset of the MIMIC-CXR dataset and demonstrate superior performance compared to existing approaches, achieving an AUROC of 0.8751 across all findings and 0.8963 on clinically significant findings. Our results show that white-box approaches leveraging model hidden states can provide reliable hallucination detection for medical AI systems, potentially improving the safety and reliability of automated radiology reporting.
Authors: Yingshui Tan, Boren Zheng, Baihui Zheng, Kerui Cao, Huiyun Jing, Jincheng Wei, Jiaheng Liu, Yancheng He, Wenbo Su, Xiangyong Zhu, Bo Zheng
Abstract: With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), significant safety concerns have emerged. Fundamentally, the safety of large language models is closely linked to the accuracy, comprehensiveness, and clarity of their understanding of safety knowledge, particularly in domains such as law, policy and ethics. This factuality ability is crucial in determining whether these models can be deployed and applied safely and compliantly within specific regions. To address these challenges and better evaluate the factuality ability of LLMs to answer short questions, we introduce the Chinese SafetyQA benchmark. Chinese SafetyQA has several properties (i.e., Chinese, Diverse, High-quality, Static, Easy-to-evaluate, Safety-related, Harmless). Based on Chinese SafetyQA, we perform a comprehensive evaluation on the factuality abilities of existing LLMs and analyze how these capabilities relate to LLM abilities, e.g., RAG ability and robustness against attacks.
Authors: Ruihong Zeng, Jinyuan Fang, Siwei Liu, Zaiqiao Meng
Abstract: Memory plays a pivotal role in enabling large language model~(LLM)-based agents to engage in complex and long-term interactions, such as question answering (QA) and dialogue systems. While various memory modules have been proposed for these tasks, the impact of different memory structures across tasks remains insufficiently explored. This paper investigates how memory structures and memory retrieval methods affect the performance of LLM-based agents. Specifically, we evaluate four types of memory structures, including chunks, knowledge triples, atomic facts, and summaries, along with mixed memory that combines these components. In addition, we evaluate three widely used memory retrieval methods: single-step retrieval, reranking, and iterative retrieval. Extensive experiments conducted across four tasks and six datasets yield the following key insights: (1) Different memory structures offer distinct advantages, enabling them to be tailored to specific tasks; (2) Mixed memory structures demonstrate remarkable resilience in noisy environments; (3) Iterative retrieval consistently outperforms other methods across various scenarios. Our investigation aims to inspire further research into the design of memory systems for LLM-based agents.
Authors: Yibo Zhao, Jiapeng Zhu, Can Xu, Xiang Li
Abstract: The rapid growth of social media platforms has raised significant concerns regarding online content toxicity. When Large Language Models (LLMs) are used for toxicity detection, two key challenges emerge: 1) the absence of domain-specific toxic knowledge leads to false negatives; 2) the excessive sensitivity of LLMs to toxic speech results in false positives, limiting freedom of speech. To address these issues, we propose a novel method called MetaTox, leveraging graph search on a meta-toxic knowledge graph to enhance hatred and toxicity detection. First, we construct a comprehensive meta-toxic knowledge graph by utilizing LLMs to extract toxic information through a three-step pipeline, with toxic benchmark datasets serving as corpora. Second, we query the graph via retrieval and ranking processes to supplement accurate, relevant toxic knowledge. Extensive experiments and in-depth case studies across multiple datasets demonstrate that our MetaTox significantly decreases the false positive rate while boosting overall toxicity detection performance. Our code will be available soon.
Authors: Geetanjali Bihani, Julia Rayz
Abstract: The advent of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has enabled significant performance gains in the field of natural language processing. However, recent studies have found PLMs to suffer from miscalibration, indicating a lack of accuracy in the confidence estimates provided by these models. Current evaluation methods for PLM calibration often assume that lower calibration error estimates indicate more reliable predictions. However, fine-tuned PLMs often resort to shortcuts, leading to overconfident predictions that create the illusion of enhanced performance but lack generalizability in their decision rules. The relationship between PLM reliability, as measured by calibration error, and shortcut learning, has not been thoroughly explored thus far. This paper aims to investigate this relationship, studying whether lower calibration error implies reliable decision rules for a language model. Our findings reveal that models with seemingly superior calibration portray higher levels of non-generalizable decision rules. This challenges the prevailing notion that well-calibrated models are inherently reliable. Our study highlights the need to bridge the current gap between language model calibration and generalization objectives, urging the development of comprehensive frameworks to achieve truly robust and reliable language models.
Authors: Hanyu Zhang, Boyu Qiu, Yuhao Feng, Shuqi Li, Qian Ma, Xiyuan Zhang, Qiang Ju, Dong Yan, Jian Xie
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in language understanding, generation, and reasoning, yet their potential in finance remains underexplored due to the complexity and specialization of financial knowledge. In this work, we report the development of the Baichuan4-Finance series, including a comprehensive suite of foundational Baichuan4-Finance-Base and an aligned language model Baichuan4-Finance, which are built upon Baichuan4-Turbo base model and tailored for finance domain. Firstly, we have dedicated significant effort to building a detailed pipeline for improving data quality. Moreover, in the continual pre-training phase, we propose a novel domain self-constraint training strategy, which enables Baichuan4-Finance-Base to acquire financial knowledge without losing general capabilities. After Supervised Fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and AI Feedback, the chat model Baichuan4-Finance is able to tackle various financial certification questions and real-world scenario applications. We evaluate Baichuan4-Finance on many widely used general datasets and two holistic financial benchmarks. The evaluation results show that Baichuan4-Finance-Base surpasses almost all competitive baselines on financial tasks by significant margins without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmarks. At the same time, Baichuan4-Finance demonstrates even more impressive performance on financial application scenarios, showcasing its potential to foster community innovation in the financial LLM field.
Authors: Gongbo Zhang, Zihan Xu, Qiao Jin, Fangyi Chen, Yilu Fang, Yi Liu, Justin F. Rousseau, Ziyang Xu, Zhiyong Lu, Chunhua Weng, Yifan Peng
Abstract: While holding great promise for improving and facilitating healthcare, large language models (LLMs) struggle to produce up-to-date responses on evolving topics due to outdated knowledge or hallucination. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a pivotal innovation that improves the accuracy and relevance of LLM responses by integrating LLMs with a search engine and external sources of knowledge. However, the quality of RAG responses can be largely impacted by the rank and density of key information in the retrieval results, such as the "lost-in-the-middle" problem. In this work, we aim to improve the robustness and reliability of the RAG workflow in the medical domain. Specifically, we propose a map-reduce strategy, BriefContext, to combat the "lost-in-the-middle" issue without modifying the model weights. We demonstrated the advantage of the workflow with various LLM backbones and on multiple QA datasets. This method promises to improve the safety and reliability of LLMs deployed in healthcare domains.
Authors: Yuzheng Cai, Zhenyue Guo, Yiwen Pei, Wanrui Bian, Weiguo Zheng
Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive versatility across various tasks. To eliminate its hallucinations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful approach, leveraging external knowledge sources like knowledge graphs (KGs). In this paper, we study the task of KG-driven RAG and propose a novel Similar Graph Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (SimGRAG) method. It effectively addresses the challenge of aligning query texts and KG structures through a two-stage process: (1) query-to-pattern, which uses an LLM to transform queries into a desired graph pattern, and (2) pattern-to-subgraph, which quantifies the alignment between the pattern and candidate subgraphs using a graph semantic distance (GSD) metric. We also develop an optimized retrieval algorithm that efficiently identifies the top-$k$ subgraphs within 1-second latency on a 10-million-scale KG. Extensive experiments show that SimGRAG outperforms state-of-the-art KG-driven RAG methods in both question answering and fact verification, offering superior plug-and-play usability and scalability.
Authors: Jiale Liu, Yifan Zeng, Malte H{\o}jmark-Bertelsen, Marie Normann Gadeberg, Huazheng Wang, Qingyun Wu
Abstract: Traditional enterprises face significant challenges in processing business documents, where tasks like extracting transport references from invoices remain largely manual despite their crucial role in logistics operations. While Large Language Models offer potential automation, their direct application to specialized business domains often yields unsatisfactory results. We introduce Matrix (Memory-Augmented agent Training through Reasoning and Iterative eXploration), a novel paradigm that enables LLM agents to progressively build domain expertise through experience-driven memory refinement and iterative learning. To validate this approach, we collaborate with one of the world's largest logistics companies to create a dataset of Universal Business Language format invoice documents, focusing on the task of transport reference extraction. Experiments demonstrate that Matrix outperforms prompting a single LLM by 30.3%, vanilla LLM agent by 35.2%. We further analyze the metrics of the optimized systems and observe that the agent system requires less API calls, fewer costs and can analyze longer documents on average. Our methods establish a new approach to transform general-purpose LLMs into specialized business tools through systematic memory enhancement in document processing tasks.
Authors: Biao Liu, Wenyi Fang, Xiaoyu Wu, Yang Zheng, Zheng Hu, Bo Yuan
Abstract: Pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) models such as CLIP have demonstrated their excellent performance across numerous downstream tasks. A recent method, Context Optimization (CoOp), further improves the performance of VL models on downstream tasks by introducing prompt learning. CoOp optimizes a set of learnable vectors, aka prompt, and freezes the whole CLIP model. However, relying solely on CLIP loss to fine-tune prompts can lead to models that are prone to overfitting on downstream task. To address this issue, we propose a plug-in prompt-regularization method called PLPP (Prompt Learning with PerPlexity), which use perplexity loss to regularize prompt learning. PLPP designs a two-step operation to compute the perplexity for prompts: (a) calculating cosine similarity between the weight of the embedding layer and prompts to get labels, (b) introducing a language model (LM) head that requires no training behind text encoder to output word probability distribution. Meanwhile, we unveil that the essence of PLPP is inherently a form of self-distillation. To further prevent overfitting as well as to reduce the additional computation introduced by PLPP, we turn the hard label to soft label and choose top-$k$ values for calculating the perplexity loss. For accelerating model convergence, we introduce mutual self-distillation learning, that is perplexity and inverted perplexity loss. The experiments conducted on four classification tasks indicate that PLPP exhibits superior performance compared to existing methods.
Authors: Baolong Bi, Shaohan Huang, Yiwei Wang, Tianchi Yang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Lingrui Mei, Junfeng Fang, Zehao Li, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Shenghua Liu
Abstract: Reliable responses from large language models (LLMs) require adherence to user instructions and retrieved information. While alignment techniques help LLMs align with human intentions and values, improving context-faithfulness through alignment remains underexplored. To address this, we propose $\textbf{Context-DPO}$, the first alignment method specifically designed to enhance LLMs' context-faithfulness. We introduce $\textbf{ConFiQA}$, a benchmark that simulates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) scenarios with knowledge conflicts to evaluate context-faithfulness. By leveraging faithful and stubborn responses to questions with provided context from ConFiQA, our Context-DPO aligns LLMs through direct preference optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Context-DPO significantly improves context-faithfulness, achieving 35% to 280% improvements on popular open-source models. Further analysis demonstrates that Context-DPO preserves LLMs' generative capabilities while providing interpretable insights into context utilization. Our code and data are released at https://github.com/byronBBL/Context-DPO
Authors: Joongwon Kim, Anirudh Goyal, Aston Zhang, Bo Xiong, Rui Hou, Melanie Kambadur, Dhruv Mahajan, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Liang Tan
Abstract: Preference learning is a widely adopted post-training technique that aligns large language models (LLMs) to human preferences and improves specific downstream task capabilities. In this work we systematically investigate how specific attributes of preference datasets affect the alignment and downstream performance of LLMs in instruction-following tasks. We use a novel synthetic data generation pipeline to generate 48,000 unique instruction-following prompts with combinations of 23 verifiable constraints that enable fine-grained and automated quality assessments of model responses. With our synthetic prompts, we use two preference dataset curation methods - rejection sampling (RS) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) - to obtain pairs of (chosen, rejected) responses. Then, we perform experiments investigating the effects of (1) the presence of shared prefixes between the chosen and rejected responses, (2) the contrast and quality of the chosen, rejected responses and (3) the complexity of the training prompts. Our experiments reveal that shared prefixes in preference pairs, as generated by MCTS, provide marginal but consistent improvements and greater stability across challenging training configurations. High-contrast preference pairs generally outperform low-contrast pairs; however, combining both often yields the best performance by balancing diversity and learning efficiency. Additionally, training on prompts of moderate difficulty leads to better generalization across tasks, even for more complex evaluation scenarios, compared to overly challenging prompts. Our findings provide actionable insights into optimizing preference data curation for instruction-following tasks, offering a scalable and effective framework for enhancing LLM training and alignment.
Authors: Mingyang Zhang, Jing Liu, Ganggui Ding, Xinyi Yu, Linlin Ou, Bohan Zhuang
Abstract: Lately, the practice of utilizing task-specific fine-tuning has been implemented to improve the performance of large language models (LLM) in subsequent tasks. Through the integration of diverse LLMs, the overall competency of LLMs is significantly boosted. Nevertheless, traditional ensemble methods are notably memory-intensive, necessitating the simultaneous loading of all specialized models into GPU memory. To address the inefficiency, model merging strategies have emerged, merging all LLMs into one model to reduce the memory footprint during inference. Despite these advances, model merging often leads to parameter conflicts and performance decline as the number of experts increases. Previous methods to mitigate these conflicts include post-pruning and partial merging. However, both approaches have limitations, particularly in terms of performance and storage efficiency when merged experts increase. To address these challenges, we introduce Channel Merging, a novel strategy designed to minimize parameter conflicts while enhancing storage efficiency. This method clusters and merges channel parameters based on their similarity to form several groups offline. By ensuring that only highly similar parameters are merged within each group, it significantly reduces parameter conflicts. During inference, we can instantly look up the expert parameters from the merged groups, preserving specialized knowledge. Our experiments demonstrate that Channel Merging consistently delivers high performance, matching unmerged models in tasks like English and Chinese reasoning, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. Moreover, it obtains results comparable to model ensemble with just 53% parameters when used with a task-specific router.
Authors: Steven Feng, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Kezhi Kong, Dan Su, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro
Abstract: Pretraining large language models effectively requires strategic data selection, blending and ordering. However, key details about data mixtures especially their scalability to longer token horizons and larger model sizes remain underexplored due to limited disclosure by model developers. To address this, we formalize the concept of two-phase pretraining and conduct an extensive systematic study on how to select and mix data to maximize model accuracies for the two phases. Our findings illustrate that a two-phase approach for pretraining outperforms random data ordering and natural distribution of tokens by 3.4% and 17% on average accuracies. We provide in-depth guidance on crafting optimal blends based on quality of the data source and the number of epochs to be seen. We propose to design blends using downsampled data at a smaller scale of 1T tokens and then demonstrate effective scaling of our approach to larger token horizon of 15T tokens and larger model size of 25B model size. These insights provide a series of steps practitioners can follow to design and scale their data blends.
Authors: Yinlam Chow, Guy Tennenholtz, Izzeddin Gur, Vincent Zhuang, Bo Dai, Sridhar Thiagarajan, Craig Boutilier, Rishabh Agarwal, Aviral Kumar, Aleksandra Faust
Abstract: Recent studies have indicated that effectively utilizing inference-time compute is crucial for attaining better performance from large language models (LLMs). In this work, we propose a novel inference-aware fine-tuning paradigm, in which the model is fine-tuned in a manner that directly optimizes the performance of the inference-time strategy. We study this paradigm using the simple yet effective Best-of-N (BoN) inference strategy, in which a verifier selects the best out of a set of LLM-generated responses. We devise the first imitation learning and reinforcement learning~(RL) methods for BoN-aware fine-tuning, overcoming the challenging, non-differentiable argmax operator within BoN. We empirically demonstrate that our BoN-aware models implicitly learn a meta-strategy that interleaves best responses with more diverse responses that might be better suited to a test-time input -- a process reminiscent of the exploration-exploitation trade-off in RL. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of BoN-aware fine-tuning in terms of improved performance and inference-time compute. In particular, we show that our methods improve the Bo32 performance of Gemma 2B on Hendrycks MATH from 26.8% to 30.8%, and pass@32 from 60.0% to 67.0%, as well as the pass@16 on HumanEval from 61.6% to 67.1%.
Authors: Chenxiao Yu, Zhaotian Weng, Yuangang Li, Zheng Li, Xiyang Hu, Yue Zhao
Abstract: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) accurately predict election outcomes? While LLMs have demonstrated impressive performance in healthcare, legal analysis, and creative applications, their capabilities in election forecasting remain uncertain. Notably, election prediction poses unique challenges: limited voter-level data, evolving political contexts, and the complexity of modeling human behavior. In the first part of this paper, we explore and introduce a multi-step reasoning framework for election prediction, which systematically integrates demographic, ideological, and time-sensitive factors. Validated on 2016 and 2020 real-world data and extensive synthetic personas, our approach adapts to changing political landscapes, reducing bias and significantly improving predictive accuracy. We further apply our pipeline to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, illustrating its ability to generalize beyond observed historical data. Beyond enhancing accuracy, the second part of the paper provides insights into the broader implications of LLM-based election forecasting. We identify potential political biases embedded in pretrained corpora, examine how demographic patterns can become exaggerated, and suggest strategies for mitigating these issues. Together, this project, a large-scale LLM empirical study, advances the accuracy of election predictions and establishes directions for more balanced, transparent, and context-aware modeling in political science research and practice.
Authors: Yudi Pawitan, Chris Holmes
Abstract: There is a growing literature on reasoning by large language models (LLMs), but the discussion on the uncertainty in their responses is still lacking. Our aim is to assess the extent of confidence that LLMs have in their answers and how it correlates with accuracy. Confidence is measured (i) qualitatively in terms of persistence in keeping their answer when prompted to reconsider, and (ii) quantitatively in terms of self-reported confidence score. We investigate the performance of three LLMs -- GPT4o, GPT4-turbo and Mistral -- on two benchmark sets of questions on causal judgement and formal fallacies and a set of probability and statistical puzzles and paradoxes. Although the LLMs show significantly better performance than random guessing, there is a wide variability in their tendency to change their initial answers. There is a positive correlation between qualitative confidence and accuracy, but the overall accuracy for the second answer is often worse than for the first answer. There is a strong tendency to overstate the self-reported confidence score. Confidence is only partially explained by the underlying token-level probability. The material effects of prompting on qualitative confidence and the strong tendency for overconfidence indicate that current LLMs do not have any internally coherent sense of confidence.
Authors: Bhaskarjit Sarmah, Kriti Dutta, Anna Grigoryan, Sachin Tiwari, Stefano Pasquali, Dhagash Mehta
Abstract: We argue that the Declarative Self-improving Python (DSPy) optimizers are a way to align the large language model (LLM) prompts and their evaluations to the human annotations. We present a comparative analysis of five teleprompter algorithms, namely, Cooperative Prompt Optimization (COPRO), Multi-Stage Instruction Prompt Optimization (MIPRO), BootstrapFewShot, BootstrapFewShot with Optuna, and K-Nearest Neighbor Few Shot, within the DSPy framework with respect to their ability to align with human evaluations. As a concrete example, we focus on optimizing the prompt to align hallucination detection (using LLM as a judge) to human annotated ground truth labels for a publicly available benchmark dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that optimized prompts can outperform various benchmark methods to detect hallucination, and certain telemprompters outperform the others in at least these experiments.
Authors: Sangmin Lee, Woo-Jin Chung Hong-Goo Kang
Abstract: Building a universal multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that performs equitably across languages has long been a challenge due to its inherent difficulties. To address this task we introduce a Language-Agnostic Multilingual ASR pipeline through orthography Unification and language-specific Transliteration (LAMA-UT). LAMA-UT operates without any language-specific modules while matching the performance of state-of-the-art models trained on a minimal amount of data. Our pipeline consists of two key steps. First, we utilize a universal transcription generator to unify orthographic features into Romanized form and capture common phonetic characteristics across diverse languages. Second, we utilize a universal converter to transform these universal transcriptions into language-specific ones. In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method leveraging universal transcriptions for massively multilingual ASR. Our pipeline achieves a relative error reduction rate of 45% when compared to Whisper and performs comparably to MMS, despite being trained on only 0.1% of Whisper's training data. Furthermore, our pipeline does not rely on any language-specific modules. However, it performs on par with zero-shot ASR approaches which utilize additional language-specific lexicons and language models. We expect this framework to serve as a cornerstone for flexible multilingual ASR systems that are generalizable even to unseen languages.
Authors: Yuncheng Song, Liang Ding, Changtong Zan, Shujian Huang
Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) has shown great promise in transferring knowledge from larger teacher models to smaller student models. However, existing KD strategies for large language models often minimize output distributions between student and teacher models indiscriminately for each token. This overlooks the imbalanced nature of tokens and their varying transfer difficulties. In response, we propose a distillation strategy called Self-Evolution KD. The core of this approach involves dynamically integrating teacher distribution and one-hot distribution of ground truth into the student distribution as prior knowledge, which promotes the distillation process. It adjusts the ratio of prior knowledge based on token learning difficulty, fully leveraging the teacher model's potential. Experimental results show our method brings an average improvement of approximately 1.4 SacreBLEU points across four translation directions in the WMT22 test sets. Further analysis indicates that the improvement comes from better knowledge transfer from teachers, confirming our hypothesis.
Authors: Tran Thai Hoa, Tran Quang Duy, Khanh Quoc Tran, Kiet Van Nguyen
Abstract: The rapid spread of information in the digital age highlights the critical need for effective fact-checking tools, particularly for languages with limited resources, such as Vietnamese. In response to this challenge, we introduce ViFactCheck, the first publicly available benchmark dataset designed specifically for Vietnamese fact-checking across multiple online news domains. This dataset contains 7,232 human-annotated pairs of claim-evidence combinations sourced from reputable Vietnamese online news, covering 12 diverse topics. It has been subjected to a meticulous annotation process to ensure high quality and reliability, achieving a Fleiss Kappa inter-annotator agreement score of 0.83. Our evaluation leverages state-of-the-art pre-trained and large language models, employing fine-tuning and prompting techniques to assess performance. Notably, the Gemma model demonstrated superior effectiveness, with an impressive macro F1 score of 89.90%, thereby establishing a new standard for fact-checking benchmarks. This result highlights the robust capabilities of Gemma in accurately identifying and verifying facts in Vietnamese. To further promote advances in fact-checking technology and improve the reliability of digital media, we have made the ViFactCheck dataset, model checkpoints, fact-checking pipelines, and source code freely available on GitHub. This initiative aims to inspire further research and enhance the accuracy of information in low-resource languages.
Authors: Nishtha N. Vaidya, Thomas Runkler, Thomas Hubauer, Veronika Haderlein-Hoegberg, Maja Mlicic Brandt
Abstract: Science and engineering problems fall in the category of complex conceptual problems that require specific conceptual information (CI) like math/logic -related know-how, process information, or engineering guidelines to solve them. Large Language Models (LLMs) are promising agents to solve such complex conceptual problems due to their implications in advancing engineering and science tasks like assisted problem-solving. But vanilla LLMs, trained on open-world data, lack the necessary CI. In this work, we specifically explore shallow customization methods (SCMs) of LLMs for solving complex conceptual problems. We propose two novel SCM algorithms for LLM, to augment LLMs with CI and enable LLMs to solve complex conceptual problems: Conceptual In-Context Learning (C-ICL) and Chain of Concepts (CoC). The problem tackled in this paper is generation of proprietary data models in the engineering/industry domain based on conceptual information in data modelling guidelines. We evaluate our algorithms on varied sizes of the OpenAI LLMs against four evaluation metrics related to syntactic and semantic correctness, time and cost incurred. The proposed algorithms perform better than currently popular LLM SCMs like In-context Learning (ICL) and Chain of Thoughts (CoT). It was observed that as compared to CoT, response correctness increased by 30.6% and 29.88% for the new SCMs C-ICL and CoC respectively. Qualitative analysis suggests that the proposed new SCMs activate emergent capabilities in LLMs, previously unobserved in the existing SCMs. They make problem-solving processes more transparent and reduce hallucinations and the tendency of model responses to copy examples from prompts (parroting).
Authors: Yajing Wang, Zongwei Luo, Jingzhe Wang, Zhanke Zhou, Yongqiang Chen, Bo Han
Abstract: Prompt optimization automatically refines prompting expressions, unlocking the full potential of LLMs in downstream tasks. However, current prompt optimization methods are costly to train and lack sufficient interpretability. This paper proposes enhancing LLMs' reasoning performance by eliciting their causal inference ability from prompting instructions to correct answers. Specifically, we introduce the Self-Causal Instruction Enhancement (SCIE) method, which enables LLMs to generate high-quality, low-quantity observational data, then estimates the causal effect based on these data, and ultimately generates instructions with the optimized causal effect. In SCIE, the instructions are treated as the treatment, and textual features are used to process natural language, establishing causal relationships through treatments between instructions and downstream tasks. Additionally, we propose applying Object-Relational (OR) principles, where the uncovered causal relationships are treated as the inheritable class across task objects, ensuring low-cost reusability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively generates instructions that enhance reasoning performance with reduced training cost of prompts, leveraging interpretable textual features to provide actionable insights.
Authors: Swati Rajwal
Abstract: In recent years, the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and public health has opened innovative pathways for investigating various domains, including chronic pain in textual datasets. Despite the promise of NLP in chronic pain, the literature is dispersed across various disciplines, and there is a need to consolidate existing knowledge, identify knowledge gaps in the literature, and inform future research directions in this emerging field. This review aims to investigate the state of the research on NLP-based interventions designed for chronic pain research. A search strategy was formulated and executed across PubMed, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and ACL Anthology to find studies published in English between 2014 and 2024. After screening 132 papers, 26 studies were included in the final review. Key findings from this review underscore the significant potential of NLP techniques to address pressing challenges in chronic pain research. The past 10 years in this field have showcased the utilization of advanced methods (transformers like RoBERTa and BERT) achieving high-performance metrics (e.g., F1>0.8) in classification tasks, while unsupervised approaches like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and k-means clustering have proven effective for exploratory analyses. Results also reveal persistent challenges such as limited dataset diversity, inadequate sample sizes, and insufficient representation of underrepresented populations. Future research studies should explore multimodal data validation systems, context-aware mechanistic modeling, and the development of standardized evaluation metrics to enhance reproducibility and equity in chronic pain research.
Authors: Joanne Boisson, Zara Siddique, Hsuvas Borkakoty, Dimosthenis Antypas, Luis Espinosa Anke, Jose Camacho-Collados
Abstract: Extracting metaphors and analogies from free text requires high-level reasoning abilities such as abstraction and language understanding. Our study focuses on the extraction of the concepts that form metaphoric analogies in literary texts. To this end, we construct a novel dataset in this domain with the help of domain experts. We compare the out-of-the-box ability of recent large language models (LLMs) to structure metaphoric mappings from fragments of texts containing proportional analogies. The models are further evaluated on the generation of implicit elements of the analogy, which are indirectly suggested in the texts and inferred by human readers. The competitive results obtained by LLMs in our experiments are encouraging and open up new avenues such as automatically extracting analogies and metaphors from text instead of investing resources in domain experts to manually label data.
Authors: Lavanya Gupta, Saket Sharma, Yiyun Zhao
Abstract: Long-context large language models (LC LLMs) promise to increase reliability of LLMs in real-world tasks requiring processing and understanding of long input documents. However, this ability of LC LLMs to reliably utilize their growing context windows remains under investigation. In this work, we evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art GPT-4 suite of LC LLMs in solving a series of progressively challenging tasks, as a function of factors such as context length, task difficulty, and position of key information by creating a real world financial news dataset. Our findings indicate that LC LLMs exhibit brittleness at longer context lengths even for simple tasks, with performance deteriorating sharply as task complexity increases. At longer context lengths, these state-of-the-art models experience catastrophic failures in instruction following resulting in degenerate outputs. Our prompt ablations also reveal unfortunate continued sensitivity to both the placement of the task instruction in the context window as well as minor markdown formatting. Finally, we advocate for more rigorous evaluation of LC LLMs by employing holistic metrics such as F1 (rather than recall) and reporting confidence intervals, thereby ensuring robust and conclusive findings.
Authors: Aakash Mahalingam, Vinesh Kumar Gande, Aman Chadha, Vinija Jain, Divya Chaudhary
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have become pivotal in leveraging vast corpora to generate informed and contextually relevant responses, notably reducing hallucinations in Large Language Models. Despite significant advancements, these systems struggle to efficiently process and retrieve information from large datasets while maintaining a comprehensive understanding of the context. This paper introduces SKETCH, a novel methodology that enhances the RAG retrieval process by integrating semantic text retrieval with knowledge graphs, thereby merging structured and unstructured data for a more holistic comprehension. SKETCH, demonstrates substantial improvements in retrieval performance and maintains superior context integrity compared to traditional methods. Evaluated across four diverse datasets: QuALITY, QASPER, NarrativeQA, and Italian Cuisine-SKETCH consistently outperforms baseline approaches on key RAGAS metrics such as answer_relevancy, faithfulness, context_precision and context_recall. Notably, on the Italian Cuisine dataset, SKETCH achieved an answer relevancy of 0.94 and a context precision of 0.99, representing the highest performance across all evaluated metrics. These results highlight SKETCH's capability in delivering more accurate and contextually relevant responses, setting new benchmarks for future retrieval systems.
Authors: Bram Vanroy
Abstract: This paper introduces Fietje, a family of small language models (SLMs) specifically designed for the Dutch language. The model is based on Phi 2, an English-centric model of 2.7 billion parameters. Fietje demonstrated competitive results with larger language models upon its release. A core emphasis of this work is transparency and reproducibility: Fietje is fully open-source, with model weights, datasets, training, and evaluation code all publicly accessible. The paper discusses the performance of Fietje and many other models on an extensive evaluation suite of benchmarks on reasoning, sentiment analysis, world knowledge, linguistic acceptability and word sense disambiguation. Evaluation results illustrate the rapid progress in the field of LLMs, where recent small models outperform older, larger models that were fine-tuned for Dutch. This trend signals an exciting future for Dutch language processing, suggesting that even compact LLMs are becoming increasingly capable. Furthermore, ongoing and future efforts to adapt LLMs to Dutch are poised to enhance these models even further, broadening their applicability and accessibility. Fietje is only an intermediate step in improving accessibility to language technology for users of the Dutch language.
Authors: Sahil Wadhwa, Chengtian Xu, Haoming Chen, Aakash Mahalingam, Akankshya Kar, Divya Chaudhary
Abstract: The automatic generation of counter-speech (CS) is a critical strategy for addressing hate speech by providing constructive and informed responses. However, existing methods often fail to generate high-quality, impactful, and scalable CS, particularly across diverse linguistic contexts. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to enhance CS generation by aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Our approach leverages DPO to align LLM outputs with human preferences, ensuring contextually appropriate and linguistically adaptable responses. Additionally, we incorporate knowledge grounding to enhance the factual accuracy and relevance of generated CS. Experimental results demonstrate that DPO-aligned models significantly outperform SFT baselines on CS benchmarks while scaling effectively to multiple languages. These findings highlight the potential of preference-based alignment techniques to advance CS generation across varied linguistic settings. The model supervision and alignment is done in English and the same model is used for reporting metrics across other languages like Basque, Italian, and Spanish.
Authors: Asang Dani, Shailesh R Sathe
Abstract: Marathi is one of the most widely used languages in the world. One might expect that the latest advances in NLP research in languages like Enlighs reach such a large community. However, NLP advancements in English didn't immediately reach Indian languages like Marathi. There were several reasons for this. They included diversity of scripts used, lack of (publicly available) resources like tokenization strategies, high quality datasets \& benchmarks, and evaluation metrics. In addition to this, the morphologically rich nature of Marathi, made NLP tasks challenging. Advances in Neural Network (NN) based models and tools since the early 2000s helped improve this situation and make NLP research more accessible. In the past 10 years, significant efforts were made to improve language resources for all 22 scheduled languages of India. This paper presents a broad overview of evolution of NLP research in Indic languages with a focus on Marathi and state-of-the-art resources and tools available to the research community. It also provides an overview of tools \& techniques associated with Marathi NLP tasks.
Authors: Jiabao Qiu, Zixuan Ke, Bing Liu
Abstract: We introduce CLOB, a novel continual learning (CL) paradigm wherein a large language model (LLM) is regarded as a black box. Learning is done incrementally via only verbal prompting. CLOB does not fine-tune any part of the LLM or add any trainable parameters to it. It is particularly suitable for LLMs that are accessible via APIs. We also propose a new CL technique, called CIS, based on incremental summarization that also overcomes the LLM's input length limit. Experiments show CIS outperforms baselines by a very large margin.
Authors: Jiangnan Fang, Cheng-Tse Liu, Jieun Kim, Yash Bhedaru, Ethan Liu, Nikhil Singh, Nedim Lipka, Puneet Mathur, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Hanieh Deilamsalehy
Abstract: In this work, we propose a Multi-LLM summarization framework, and investigate two different multi-LLM strategies including centralized and decentralized. Our multi-LLM summarization framework has two fundamentally important steps at each round of conversation: generation and evaluation. These steps are different depending on whether our multi-LLM decentralized summarization is used or centralized. In both our multi-LLM decentralized and centralized strategies, we have k different LLMs that generate diverse summaries of the text. However, during evaluation, our multi-LLM centralized summarization approach leverages a single LLM to evaluate the summaries and select the best one whereas k LLMs are used for decentralized multi-LLM summarization. Overall, we find that our multi-LLM summarization approaches significantly outperform the baselines that leverage only a single LLM by up to 3x. These results indicate the effectiveness of multi-LLM approaches for summarization.
Authors: Junjie Ye, Yilong Wu, Sixian Li, Yuming Yang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Peng Wang, Zhongchao Shi, Jianping Fan, Zhengyin Du
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable advancements by leveraging tools to interact with external environments, a critical step toward generalized AI. However, the standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approach, which relies on large-scale datasets, often overlooks task-specific characteristics in tool use, leading to performance bottlenecks. To address this issue, we analyze three existing LLMs and uncover key insights: training data can inadvertently impede tool-use behavior, token importance is distributed unevenly, and errors in tool calls fall into a small set of distinct categories. Building on these findings, we propose TL-Training, a task-feature-based framework that mitigates the effects of suboptimal training data, dynamically adjusts token weights to prioritize key tokens during SFT, and incorporates a robust reward mechanism tailored to error categories, optimized through proximal policy optimization. We validate TL-Training by training CodeLLaMA-2-7B and evaluating it on four diverse open-source test sets. Our results demonstrate that the LLM trained by our method matches or surpasses both open- and closed-source LLMs in tool-use performance using only 1,217 training data points. Additionally, our method enhances robustness in noisy environments and improves general task performance, offering a scalable and efficient paradigm for tool-use training in LLMs. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Junjie-Ye/TL-Training.
Authors: Annika Marie Schoene, John E. Ortega, Rodolfo Joel Zevallos, Laura Haaber Ihle
Abstract: Recent years have seen a marked increase in research that aims to identify or predict risk, intention or ideation of suicide. The majority of new tasks, datasets, language models and other resources focus on English and on suicide in the context of Western culture. However, suicide is global issue and reducing suicide rate by 2030 is one of the key goals of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Previous work has used English dictionaries related to suicide to translate into different target languages due to lack of other available resources. Naturally, this leads to a variety of ethical tensions (e.g.: linguistic misrepresentation), where discourse around suicide is not present in a particular culture or country. In this work, we introduce the 'Lexicography Saves Lives Project' to address this issue and make three distinct contributions. First, we outline ethical consideration and provide overview guidelines to mitigate harm in developing suicide-related resources. Next, we translate an existing dictionary related to suicidal ideation into 200 different languages and conduct human evaluations on a subset of translated dictionaries. Finally, we introduce a public website to make our resources available and enable community participation.
Authors: Rodolfo Zevallos, Annika Schoene, John E. Ortega
Abstract: Suicidal ideation is a serious health problem affecting millions of people worldwide. Social networks provide information about these mental health problems through users' emotional expressions. We propose a multilingual model leveraging transformer architectures like mBERT, XML-R, and mT5 to detect suicidal text across posts in six languages - Spanish, English, German, Catalan, Portuguese and Italian. A Spanish suicide ideation tweet dataset was translated into five other languages using SeamlessM4T. Each model was fine-tuned on this multilingual data and evaluated across classification metrics. Results showed mT5 achieving the best performance overall with F1 scores above 85%, highlighting capabilities for cross-lingual transfer learning. The English and Spanish translations also displayed high quality based on perplexity. Our exploration underscores the importance of considering linguistic diversity in developing automated multilingual tools to identify suicidal risk. Limitations exist around semantic fidelity in translations and ethical implications which provide guidance for future human-in-the-loop evaluations.
Authors: Zhisheng Tang, Mayank Kejriwal
Abstract: Research on emergent patterns in Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained significant traction in both psychology and artificial intelligence, motivating the need for a comprehensive review that offers a synthesis of this complex landscape. In this article, we systematically review LLMs' capabilities across three important cognitive domains: decision-making biases, reasoning, and creativity. We use empirical studies drawing on established psychological tests and compare LLMs' performance to human benchmarks. On decision-making, our synthesis reveals that while LLMs demonstrate several human-like biases, some biases observed in humans are absent, indicating cognitive patterns that only partially align with human decision-making. On reasoning, advanced LLMs like GPT-4 exhibit deliberative reasoning akin to human System-2 thinking, while smaller models fall short of human-level performance. A distinct dichotomy emerges in creativity: while LLMs excel in language-based creative tasks, such as storytelling, they struggle with divergent thinking tasks that require real-world context. Nonetheless, studies suggest that LLMs hold considerable potential as collaborators, augmenting creativity in human-machine problem-solving settings. Discussing key limitations, we also offer guidance for future research in areas such as memory, attention, and open-source model development.
Authors: Zhenjie Xu (School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University), Wenqing Chen (School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University), Yi Tang (School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University), Xuanying Li (School of Physics and Astronomy, Sun Yat-sen University), Cheng Hu (School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University), Zhixuan Chu (School of Cyber Science and Technology, Zhejiang University), Kui Ren (School of Cyber Science and Technology, Zhejiang University), Zibin Zheng (School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University), Zhichao Lu (Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong)
Abstract: Natural language processing (NLP) has seen remarkable advancements with the development of large language models (LLMs). Despite these advancements, LLMs often produce socially biased outputs. Recent studies have mainly addressed this problem by prompting LLMs to behave ethically, but this approach results in unacceptable performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective approach within a multi-agent framework (MOMA) to mitigate social bias in LLMs without significantly compromising their performance. The key idea of MOMA involves deploying multiple agents to perform causal interventions on bias-related contents of the input questions, breaking the shortcut connection between these contents and the corresponding answers. Unlike traditional debiasing techniques leading to performance degradation, MOMA substantially reduces bias while maintaining accuracy in downstream tasks. Our experiments conducted on two datasets and two models demonstrate that MOMA reduces bias scores by up to 87.7%, with only a marginal performance degradation of up to 6.8% in the BBQ dataset. Additionally, it significantly enhances the multi-objective metric icat in the StereoSet dataset by up to 58.1%. Code will be made available at https://github.com/Cortantse/MOMA.
Authors: Vinayak Arannil, Tomal Deb, Atanu Roy
Abstract: Early identification of Adverse Drug Events (ADE) is critical for taking prompt actions while introducing new drugs into the market. These ADEs information are available through various unstructured data sources like clinical study reports, patient health records, social media posts, etc. Extracting ADEs and the related suspect drugs using machine learning is a challenging task due to the complex linguistic relations between drug ADE pairs in textual data and unavailability of large corpus of labelled datasets. This paper introduces ADEQA, a question-answer(QA) based approach using quasi supervised labelled data and sequence-to-sequence transformers to extract ADEs, drug suspects and the relationships between them. Unlike traditional QA models, natural language generation (NLG) based models don't require extensive token level labelling and thereby reduces the adoption barrier significantly. On a public ADE corpus, we were able to achieve state-of-the-art results with an F1 score of 94% on establishing the relationships between ADEs and the respective suspects.
Authors: Xinxi Lyu, Yizhong Wang, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Pradeep Dasigi
Abstract: Evaluating the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in following instructions has heavily relied on a powerful LLM as the judge, introducing unresolved biases that deviate the judgments from human judges. In this work, we reevaluate various choices for automatic evaluation on a wide range of instruction-following tasks. We experiment with methods that leverage human-written responses and observe that they enhance the reliability of automatic evaluations across a wide range of tasks, resulting in up to a 3.2% improvement in agreement with human judges. We also discovered that human-written responses offer an orthogonal perspective to model-generated responses in following instructions and should be used as an additional context when comparing model responses. Based on these observations, we develop a new evaluation benchmark, Human Response-Guided Evaluation of Instruction Following (HREF), comprising 4,258 samples across 11 task categories with a composite evaluation setup, employing a composite evaluation setup that selects the most reliable method for each category. In addition to providing reliable evaluation, HREF emphasizes individual task performance and is free from contamination. Finally, we study the impact of key design choices in HREF, including the size of the evaluation set, the judge model, the baseline model, and the prompt template. We host a live leaderboard that evaluates LLMs on the private evaluation set of HREF.
Authors: Qianren Mao, Yangyifei Luo, Jinlong Zhang, Hanwen Hao, Zhilong Cao, Xiaolong Wang, Xiao Guan, Zhenting Huang, Weifeng Jiang, Shuyu Guo, Zhentao Han, Qili Zhang, Siyuan Tao, Yujie Liu, Junnan Liu, Zhixing Tan, Jie Sun, Bo Li, Xudong Liu, Richong Zhang, Jianxin Li
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) synergizes the retrieval of pertinent data with the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring that the generated output is not only contextually relevant but also accurate and current.We introduce XRAG, an open-source, modular codebase that facilitates exhaustive evaluation of the performance of foundational components of advanced RAG modules. These components are systematically categorized into four core phases: pre-retrieval, retrieval, post-retrieval, and generation. We systematically analyse them across reconfigured datasets, providing a comprehensive benchmark for their effectiveness. Given the escalating complexity of RAG systems, we underscore the necessity of identifying potential failure points of RAG modules. We formulate a suite of experimental methodologies and diagnostic testing protocols to dissect the failure points inherent in the engineering of RAG modules. Subsequently, we proffer bespoke solutions that are designed to augment the validation processes and bolster the overall performance of these modules. Our work thoroughly evaluates the performance of core advanced components in RAG systems, providing insights into optimizations for prevalent failure points.
Authors: Zhang Siyue, Xue Yuxiang, Zhang Yiming, Wu Xiaobao, Luu Anh Tuan, Zhao Chen
Abstract: Understanding temporal relations and answering time-sensitive questions is crucial yet a challenging task for question-answering systems powered by large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches either update the parametric knowledge of LLMs with new facts, which is resource-intensive and often impractical, or integrate LLMs with external knowledge retrieval (i.e., retrieval-augmented generation). However, off-the-shelf retrievers often struggle to identify relevant documents that require intensive temporal reasoning. To systematically study time-sensitive question answering, we introduce the TempRAGEval benchmark, which repurposes existing datasets by incorporating temporal perturbations and gold evidence labels. As anticipated, all existing retrieval methods struggle with these temporal reasoning-intensive questions. We further propose Modular Retrieval (MRAG), a trainless framework that includes three modules: (1) Question Processing that decomposes question into a main content and a temporal constraint; (2) Retrieval and Summarization that retrieves evidence and uses LLMs to summarize according to the main content; (3) Semantic-Temporal Hybrid Ranking that scores each evidence summarization based on both semantic and temporal relevance. On TempRAGEval, MRAG significantly outperforms baseline retrievers in retrieval performance, leading to further improvements in final answer accuracy.
Authors: Zheyuan Zhang, Yiyang Li, Nhi Ha Lan Le, Zehong Wang, Tianyi Ma, Vincent Galassi, Keerthiram Murugesan, Nuno Moniz, Werner Geyer, Nitesh V Chawla, Chuxu Zhang, Yanfang Ye
Abstract: Diet plays a critical role in human health, yet tailoring dietary reasoning to individual health conditions remains a major challenge. Nutrition Question Answering (QA) has emerged as a popular method for addressing this problem. However, current research faces two critical limitations. On one hand, the absence of datasets involving user-specific medical information severely limits \textit{personalization}. This challenge is further compounded by the wide variability in individual health needs. On the other hand, while large language models (LLMs), a popular solution for this task, demonstrate strong reasoning abilities, they struggle with the domain-specific complexities of personalized healthy dietary reasoning, and existing benchmarks fail to capture these challenges. To address these gaps, we introduce the Nutritional Graph Question Answering (NGQA) benchmark, the first graph question answering dataset designed for personalized nutritional health reasoning. NGQA leverages data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS) to evaluate whether a food is healthy for a specific user, supported by explanations of the key contributing nutrients. The benchmark incorporates three question complexity settings and evaluates reasoning across three downstream tasks. Extensive experiments with LLM backbones and baseline models demonstrate that the NGQA benchmark effectively challenges existing models. In sum, NGQA addresses a critical real-world problem while advancing GraphQA research with a novel domain-specific benchmark.
Authors: Saleh Momeni, Sahisnu Mazumder, Zixuan Ke, Bing Liu
Abstract: Existing continual learning (CL) methods mainly rely on fine-tuning or adapting large language models (LLMs). They still suffer from catastrophic forgetting (CF). Little work has been done to exploit in-context learning (ICL) to leverage the extensive knowledge within LLMs for CL without updating any parameters. However, incrementally learning each new task in ICL necessitates adding training examples from each class of the task to the prompt, which hampers scalability as the prompt length increases. This issue not only leads to excessively long prompts that exceed the input token limit of the underlying LLM but also degrades the model's performance due to the overextended context. To address this, we introduce InCA, a novel approach that integrates an external continual learner (ECL) with ICL to enable scalable CL without CF. The ECL is built incrementally to pre-select a small subset of likely classes for each test instance. By restricting the ICL prompt to only these selected classes, InCA prevents prompt lengths from becoming excessively long, while maintaining high performance. Experimental results demonstrate that InCA significantly outperforms existing CL baselines, achieving substantial performance gains.
Authors: Danial Kamali, Elham J. Barezi, Parisa Kordjamshidi
Abstract: Compositional generalization is crucial for artificial intelligence agents to solve complex vision-language reasoning tasks. Neuro-symbolic approaches have demonstrated promise in capturing compositional structures, but they face critical challenges: (a) reliance on predefined predicates for symbolic representations that limit adaptability, (b) difficulty in extracting predicates from raw data, and (c) using non-differentiable operations for combining primitive concepts. To address these issues, we propose NeSyCoCo, a neuro-symbolic framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate symbolic representations and map them to differentiable neural computations. NeSyCoCo introduces three innovations: (a) augmenting natural language inputs with dependency structures to enhance the alignment with symbolic representations, (b) employing distributed word representations to link diverse, linguistically motivated logical predicates to neural modules, and (c) using the soft composition of normalized predicate scores to align symbolic and differentiable reasoning. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on the ReaSCAN and CLEVR-CoGenT compositional generalization benchmarks and demonstrates robust performance with novel concepts in the CLEVR-SYN benchmark.
Authors: Xiaoqiang Kang, Zimu Wang, Xiaobo Jin, Wei Wang, Kaizhu Huang, Qiufeng Wang
Abstract: Solving tabular math word problems (TMWPs) has become a critical role in evaluating the mathematical reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), where large-scale TMWP samples are commonly required for LLM fine-tuning. Since the collection of high-quality TMWP datasets is costly and time-consuming, recent research has concentrated on automatic TMWP generation. However, current generated samples usually suffer from issues of either correctness or diversity. In this paper, we propose a Template-driven LLM-paraphrased (TeLL) framework for generating high-quality TMWP samples with diverse backgrounds and accurate tables, questions, answers, and solutions. To this end, we first extract templates from existing real samples to generate initial problems, ensuring correctness. Then, we adopt an LLM to extend templates and paraphrase problems, obtaining diverse TMWP samples. Furthermore, we find the reasoning annotation is important for solving TMWPs. Therefore, we propose to enrich each solution with illustrative reasoning steps. Through the proposed framework, we construct a high-quality dataset TabMWP-TeLL by adhering to the question types in the TabMWP dataset, and we conduct extensive experiments on a variety of LLMs to demonstrate the effectiveness of TabMWP-TeLL in improving TMWP solving performance. The code and data of this paper are available at: https://github.com/Jason8Kang/TELL.
Authors: Gyutae Park, Ingeol Baek, ByeongJeong Kim, Joongbo Shin, Hwanhee Lee
Abstract: Dialogue intent classification aims to identify the underlying purpose or intent of a user's input in a conversation. Current intent classification systems encounter considerable challenges, primarily due to the vast number of possible intents and the significant semantic overlap among similar intent classes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to few-shot dialogue intent classification through in-context learning, incorporating dynamic label refinement to address these challenges. Our method retrieves relevant examples for a test input from the training set and leverages a large language model to dynamically refine intent labels based on semantic understanding, ensuring that intents are clearly distinguishable from one another. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively resolves confusion between semantically similar intents, resulting in significantly enhanced performance across multiple datasets compared to baselines. We also show that our method generates more interpretable intent labels, and has a better semantic coherence in capturing underlying user intents compared to baselines.
Authors: Brian J Chan, Chao-Ting Chen, Jui-Hung Cheng, Hen-Hsen Huang
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has gained traction as a powerful approach for enhancing language models by integrating external knowledge sources. However, RAG introduces challenges such as retrieval latency, potential errors in document selection, and increased system complexity. With the advent of large language models (LLMs) featuring significantly extended context windows, this paper proposes an alternative paradigm, cache-augmented generation (CAG) that bypasses real-time retrieval. Our method involves preloading all relevant resources, especially when the documents or knowledge for retrieval are of a limited and manageable size, into the LLM's extended context and caching its runtime parameters. During inference, the model utilizes these preloaded parameters to answer queries without additional retrieval steps. Comparative analyses reveal that CAG eliminates retrieval latency and minimizes retrieval errors while maintaining context relevance. Performance evaluations across multiple benchmarks highlight scenarios where long-context LLMs either outperform or complement traditional RAG pipelines. These findings suggest that, for certain applications, particularly those with a constrained knowledge base, CAG provide a streamlined and efficient alternative to RAG, achieving comparable or superior results with reduced complexity.
Authors: Jianfei Xu
Abstract: This study analyzes 13,218 product reviews from JD.com, covering four categories: mobile phones, computers, cosmetics, and food. A novel method for feature label extraction is proposed by integrating dependency parsing and sentiment polarity analysis. The proposed method addresses the challenges of low robustness in existing extraction algorithms and significantly enhances extraction accuracy. Experimental results show that the method achieves an accuracy of 0.7, with recall and F-score both stabilizing at 0.8, demonstrating its effectiveness. However, challenges such as dependence on matching dictionaries and the limited scope of extracted feature tags require further investigation in future research.
Authors: Mengyu Ye, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Goro Kobayashi, Jun Suzuki
Abstract: Elucidating the rationale behind neural models' outputs has been challenging in the machine learning field, which is indeed applicable in this age of large language models (LLMs) and in-context learning (ICL). When it comes to estimating input attributions (IA), ICL poses a new issue of interpreting which example in the prompt, consisting of a set of examples, contributed to identifying the task/rule to be solved. To this end, in this paper, we introduce synthetic diagnostic tasks inspired by the poverty of the stimulus design in inductive reasoning; here, most in-context examples are ambiguous w.r.t. their underlying rule, and one critical example disambiguates the task demonstrated. The question is whether conventional IA methods can identify such an example in interpreting the inductive reasoning process in ICL. Our experiments provide several practical findings; for example, a certain simple IA method works the best, and the larger the model, the generally harder it is to interpret the ICL with gradient-based IA methods.
Authors: Barry Menglong Yao (UC Davis), Qifan Wang (Meta AI), Lifu Huang (UC Davis)
Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across numerous academic benchmarks. However, fine-tuning still remains essential to achieve satisfactory performance on downstream tasks, while the task-specific tuning samples are usually not readily available or expensive and time-consuming to obtain. To address this, we propose an error-driven data-efficient tuning framework that aims to efficiently adapt generic LMMs to newly emerging tasks without requiring any task-specific training samples. In our approach, a generic LMM, acting as a student model, is first evaluated on a small validation set of the target task, and then a more powerful model, acting as a teacher model, identifies the erroneous steps within the student model's reasoning steps and analyzes its capability gaps from fully addressing the target task. Based on these gaps, targeted training samples are further retrieved from existing task-agnostic datasets to tune the student model and tailor it to the target task. We perform extensive experiments across three different training data scales and seven tasks, demonstrating that our training paradigm significantly and efficiently improves LMM's performance on downstream tasks, achieving an average performance boost of 7.01%.
Authors: Sieun Hyeon, Kyudan Jung, Jaehee Won, Nam-Joon Kim, Hyun Gon Ryu, Hyuk-Jae Lee, Jaeyoung Do
Abstract: In various academic and professional settings, such as mathematics lectures or research presentations, it is often necessary to convey mathematical expressions orally. However, reading mathematical expressions aloud without accompanying visuals can significantly hinder comprehension, especially for those who are hearing-impaired or rely on subtitles due to language barriers. For instance, when a presenter reads Euler's Formula, current Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models often produce a verbose and error-prone textual description (e.g., e to the power of i x equals cosine of x plus i $\textit{side}$ of x), instead of the concise $\LaTeX{}$ format (i.e., $ e^{ix} = \cos(x) + i\sin(x) $), which hampers clear understanding and communication. To address this issue, we introduce MathSpeech, a novel pipeline that integrates ASR models with small Language Models (sLMs) to correct errors in mathematical expressions and accurately convert spoken expressions into structured $\LaTeX{}$ representations. Evaluated on a new dataset derived from lecture recordings, MathSpeech demonstrates $\LaTeX{}$ generation capabilities comparable to leading commercial Large Language Models (LLMs), while leveraging fine-tuned small language models of only 120M parameters. Specifically, in terms of CER, BLEU, and ROUGE scores for $\LaTeX{}$ translation, MathSpeech demonstrated significantly superior capabilities compared to GPT-4o. We observed a decrease in CER from 0.390 to 0.298, and higher ROUGE/BLEU scores compared to GPT-4o.
Authors: Evgenia Ilia, Wilker Aziz
Abstract: With the broader use of language models (LMs) comes the need to estimate their ability to respond reliably to prompts (e.g., are generated responses likely to be correct?). Uncertainty quantification tools (notions of confidence and entropy, i.a.) can be used to that end (e.g., to reject a response when the model is `uncertain'). For example, Kuhn et al. (semantic entropy; 2022b) regard semantic variation amongst sampled responses as evidence that the model `struggles' with the prompt and that the LM is likely to err. We argue that semantic variability need not imply error--this being especially intuitive in open-ended settings, where prompts elicit multiple adequate but semantically distinct responses. Hence, we propose to annotate sampled responses for their adequacy to the prompt (e.g., using a classifier) and estimate the Probability the model assigns to Adequate Responses (PROBAR), which we then regard as an indicator of the model's reliability at the instance level. We evaluate PROBAR as a measure of confidence in selective prediction with OPT models (in two QA datasets and in next-word prediction, for English) and find PROBAR to outperform semantic entropy across prompts with varying degrees of ambiguity/open-endedness.
Authors: Maike Z\"ufle, Jan Niehues
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing but adapting these LLMs to speech processing tasks efficiently is not straightforward. Direct task-specific fine-tuning is limited by overfitting risks, data requirements, and computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose a scalable, two-stage training approach: (1) A task-independent speech pretraining stage using contrastive learning to align text and speech representations over all layers, followed by (2) a task-specific fine-tuning stage requiring minimal data. This approach outperforms traditional ASR pretraining and enables the model to surpass models specialized on speech translation and question answering while being trained on only 10% of the task-specific data.
Authors: Vincenzo Timmel, Claudio Paonessa, Reza Kakooee, Manfred Vogel, Daniel Perruchoud
Abstract: This paper presents a new approach to fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper model for low-resource languages by introducing a novel data generation method that converts sentence-level data into a long-form corpus, using Swiss German as a case study. Non-sentence-level data, which could improve the performance of long-form audio, is difficult to obtain and often restricted by copyright laws. Our method bridges this gap by transforming more accessible sentence-level data into a format that preserves the model's ability to handle long-form audio and perform segmentation without requiring non-sentence-level data. Our data generation process improves performance in several real-world applications and leads to the development of a new state-of-the-art speech-to-text (STT) model for Swiss German. We compare our model with a non-fine-tuned Whisper and our previous state-of-the-art Swiss German STT models, where our new model achieves higher BLEU scores. Our results also indicate that the proposed method is adaptable to other low-resource languages, supported by written guidance and code that allows the creation of fine-tuned Whisper models, which keep segmentation capabilities and allow the transcription of longer audio files using only sentence-level data with high quality.
Authors: Shamus Sim, Tyrone Chen
Abstract: Background: Despite the current ubiquity of Large Language Models (LLMs) across the medical domain, there is a surprising lack of studies which address their reasoning behaviour. We emphasise the importance of understanding reasoning behaviour as opposed to high-level prediction accuracies, since it is equivalent to explainable AI (XAI) in this context. In particular, achieving XAI in medical LLMs used in the clinical domain will have a significant impact across the healthcare sector. Results: Therefore, we define the concept of reasoning behaviour in the specific context of medical LLMs. We then categorise and discuss the current state of the art of methods which evaluate reasoning behaviour in medical LLMs. Finally, we propose theoretical frameworks which can empower medical professionals or machine learning engineers to gain insight into the low-level reasoning operations of these previously obscure models. Conclusion: The subsequent increased transparency and trust in medical machine learning models by clinicians as well as patients will accelerate the integration, application as well as further development of medical AI for the healthcare system as a whole
Authors: Jonathan Heitz, Gerold Schneider, Nicolas Langer
Abstract: Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a significant and growing public health concern. Investigating alterations in speech and language patterns offers a promising path towards cost-effective and non-invasive early detection of AD on a large scale. Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT, have enabled powerful new possibilities for semantic text analysis. In this study, we leverage GPT-4 to extract five semantic features from transcripts of spontaneous patient speech. The features capture known symptoms of AD, but they are difficult to quantify effectively using traditional methods of computational linguistics. We demonstrate the clinical significance of these features and further validate one of them ("Word-Finding Difficulties") against a proxy measure and human raters. When combined with established linguistic features and a Random Forest classifier, the GPT-derived features significantly improve the detection of AD. Our approach proves effective for both manually transcribed and automatically generated transcripts, representing a novel and impactful use of recent advancements in LLMs for AD speech analysis.
Authors: Dominique Brunato
Abstract: This position paper investigates the potential of integrating insights from language impairment research and its clinical treatment to develop human-inspired learning strategies and evaluation frameworks for language models (LMs). We inspect the theoretical underpinnings underlying some influential linguistically motivated training approaches derived from neurolinguistics and, particularly, aphasiology, aimed at enhancing the recovery and generalization of linguistic skills in aphasia treatment, with a primary focus on those targeting the syntactic domain. We highlight how these insights can inform the design of rigorous assessments for LMs, specifically in their handling of complex syntactic phenomena, as well as their implications for developing human-like learning strategies, aligning with efforts to create more sustainable and cognitively plausible natural language processing (NLP) models.
Authors: Sungjin Park, Xiao Liu, Yeyun Gong, Edward Choi
Abstract: Despite recent advances in large language models, open-source models often struggle to consistently perform well on complex reasoning tasks. Existing ensemble methods, whether applied at the token or output levels, fail to address these challenges. In response, we present Language model Ensemble with Monte Carlo Tree Search (LE-MCTS), a novel framework for process-level ensembling of language models. LE-MCTS formulates step-by-step reasoning with an ensemble of language models as a Markov decision process. In this framework, states represent intermediate reasoning paths, while actions consist of generating the next reasoning step using one of the language models selected from a predefined pool. Guided by a process-based reward model, LE-MCTS performs a tree search over the reasoning steps generated by different language models, identifying the most accurate reasoning chain. Experimental results on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms both single language model decoding algorithms and language model ensemble methods. Notably, LE-MCTS improves performance by 3.6% and 4.3% on the MATH and MQA datasets, respectively, highlighting its effectiveness in solving complex reasoning problems.
Authors: Juan-Manuel Torres-Moreno, Juan-Jos\'e Guzm\'an-Landa, Graham Ranger, Martha Lorena Avenda\~no Garrido, Miguel Figueroa-Saavedra, Ligia Quintana-Torres, Carlos-Emiliano Gonz\'alez-Gallardo, Elvys Linhares Pontes, Patricia Vel\'azquez Morales, Luis-Gil Moreno Jim\'enez
Abstract: The NAHU$^2$ project is a Franco-Mexican collaboration aimed at building the $\pi$-YALLI corpus adapted to machine learning, which will subsequently be used to develop computer resources for the Nahuatl language. Nahuatl is a language with few computational resources, even though it is a living language spoken by around 2 million people. We have decided to build $\pi$-YALLI, a corpus that will enable to carry out research on Nahuatl in order to develop Language Models (LM), whether dynamic or not, which will make it possible to in turn enable the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools such as: a) a grapheme unifier, b) a word segmenter, c) a POS grammatical analyser, d) a content-based Automatic Text Summarization; and possibly, e) a translator translator (probabilistic or learning-based).
Authors: Camille Barboule, Viet-Phi Huynh, Adrien Bufort, Yoan Chabot, G\'eraldine Damnati, Gw\'enol\'e Lecorv\'e
Abstract: Despite outstanding processes in many tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) still lack accuracy when dealing with highly technical domains. Especially, telecommunications (telco) is a particularly challenging domain due the large amount of lexical, semantic and conceptual peculiarities. Yet, this domain holds many valuable use cases, directly linked to industrial needs. Hence, this paper studies how LLMs can be adapted to the telco domain. It reports our effort to (i) collect a massive corpus of domain-specific data (800M tokens, 80K instructions), (ii) perform adaptation using various methodologies, and (iii) benchmark them against larger generalist models in downstream tasks that require extensive knowledge of telecommunications. Our experiments on Llama-2-7b show that domain-adapted models can challenge the large generalist models. They also suggest that adaptation can be restricted to a unique instruction-tuning step, dicarding the need for any fine-tuning on raw texts beforehand.
Authors: Chang Weng, Scott Rood, Mehdi Ali Ramezani, Amir Aslani, Reza Zarrab, Wang Zwuo, Sanjeev Salimans, Tim Satheesh
Abstract: Natural Language Processing (NLP) is widely used in fields like machine translation and sentiment analysis. However, traditional NLP models struggle with accuracy and efficiency. This paper introduces Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) into NLP to address these issues. By integrating DCNN, machine learning (ML) algorithms, and generative adversarial networks (GAN), the study improves language understanding, reduces ambiguity, and enhances task performance. The high-performance NLP model shows a 10% improvement in segmentation accuracy and a 4% increase in recall rate compared to traditional models. This integrated approach excels in tasks such as word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, machine translation, and text classification, offering better recognition accuracy and processing efficiency.
Authors: Lorenz Wendlinger, Christian Braun, Abdullah Al Zubaer, Simon Alexander Nonn, Sarah Gro{\ss}kopf, Christofer Fellicious, Michael Granitzer
Abstract: We show that current open-source foundational LLMs possess instruction capability and German legal background knowledge that is sufficient for some legal analysis in an educational context. However, model capability breaks down in very specific tasks, such as the classification of "Gutachtenstil" appraisal style components, or with complex contexts, such as complete legal opinions. Even with extended context and effective prompting strategies, they cannot match the Bag-of-Words baseline. To combat this, we introduce a Retrieval Augmented Generation based prompt example selection method that substantially improves predictions in high data availability scenarios. We further evaluate the performance of pre-trained LLMs on two standard tasks for argument mining and automated essay scoring and find it to be more adequate. Throughout, pre-trained LLMs improve upon the baseline in scenarios with little or no labeled data with Chain-of-Thought prompting further helping in the zero-shot case.
Authors: Yosuke Yamagishi, Yuta Nakamura, Tomohiro Kikuchi, Yuki Sonoda, Hiroshi Hirakawa, Shintaro Kano, Satoshi Nakamura, Shouhei Hanaoka, Takeharu Yoshikawa, Osamu Abe
Abstract: Background: Recent advances in large language models highlight the need for high-quality multilingual medical datasets. While Japan leads globally in CT scanner deployment and utilization, the lack of large-scale Japanese radiology datasets has hindered the development of specialized language models for medical imaging analysis. Objective: To develop a comprehensive Japanese CT report dataset through machine translation and establish a specialized language model for structured finding classification. Additionally, to create a rigorously validated evaluation dataset through expert radiologist review. Methods: We translated the CT-RATE dataset (24,283 CT reports from 21,304 patients) into Japanese using GPT-4o mini. The training dataset consisted of 22,778 machine-translated reports, while the validation dataset included 150 radiologist-revised reports. We developed CT-BERT-JPN based on "tohoku-nlp/bert-base-japanese-v3" architecture for extracting 18 structured findings from Japanese radiology reports. Results: Translation metrics showed strong performance with BLEU scores of 0.731 and 0.690, and ROUGE scores ranging from 0.770 to 0.876 for Findings and from 0.748 to 0.857 for Impression sections. CT-BERT-JPN demonstrated superior performance compared to GPT-4o in 11 out of 18 conditions, including lymphadenopathy (+14.2%), interlobular septal thickening (+10.9%), and atelectasis (+7.4%). The model maintained F1 scores exceeding 0.95 in 14 out of 18 conditions and achieved perfect scores in four conditions. Conclusions: Our study establishes a robust Japanese CT report dataset and demonstrates the effectiveness of a specialized language model for structured finding classification. The hybrid approach of machine translation and expert validation enables the creation of large-scale medical datasets while maintaining high quality.
Authors: Ruize Shi, Hong Huang, Wei Zhou, Kehan Yin, Kai Zhao, Yun Zhao
Abstract: The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has transformed many industries, including healthcare. However, previous medical LLMs have largely focused on leveraging general medical knowledge to provide responses, without accounting for patient variability and lacking true personalization at the individual level. To address this, we propose a novel method called personalized medical language model (PMLM), which explores and optimizes personalized LLMs through recommendation systems and reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, by utilizing self-informed and peer-informed personalization, PMLM captures changes in behaviors and preferences to design initial personalized prompts tailored to individual needs. We further refine these initial personalized prompts through RL, ultimately enhancing the precision of LLM guidance. Notably, the personalized prompt are hard prompt, which grants PMLM high adaptability and reusability, allowing it to directly leverage high-quality proprietary LLMs. We evaluate PMLM using real-world obstetrics and gynecology data, and the experimental results demonstrate that PMLM achieves personalized responses, and it provides more refined and individualized services, offering a potential way for personalized medical LLMs.
Authors: Patrick Haller, Jonas Golde, Alan Akbik
Abstract: This paper explores the potential of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and other subquadratic architectures as competitive alternatives to transformer-based models in low-resource language modeling scenarios. We utilize HGRN2 (Qin et al., 2024), a recently proposed RNN-based architecture, and comparatively evaluate its effectiveness against transformer-based baselines and other subquadratic architectures (LSTM, xLSTM, Mamba). Our experimental results show that BABYHGRN, our HGRN2 language model, outperforms transformer-based models in both the 10M and 100M word tracks of the challenge, as measured by their performance on the BLiMP, EWoK, GLUE and BEAR benchmarks. Further, we show the positive impact of knowledge distillation. Our findings challenge the prevailing focus on transformer architectures and indicate the viability of RNN-based models, particularly in resource-constrained environments.
Authors: Lynn Greschner, Roman Klinger
Abstract: Arguments evoke emotions, influencing the effect of the argument itself. Not only the emotional intensity but also the category influence the argument's effects, for instance, the willingness to adapt stances. While binary emotionality has been studied in arguments, there is no work on discrete emotion categories (e.g., "Anger") in such data. To fill this gap, we crowdsource subjective annotations of emotion categories in a German argument corpus and evaluate automatic LLM-based labeling methods. Specifically, we compare three prompting strategies (zero-shot, one-shot, chain-of-thought) on three large instruction-tuned language models (Falcon-7b-instruct, Llama-3.1-8B-instruct, GPT-4o-mini). We further vary the definition of the output space to be binary (is there emotionality in the argument?), closed-domain (which emotion from a given label set is in the argument?), or open-domain (which emotion is in the argument?). We find that emotion categories enhance the prediction of emotionality in arguments, emphasizing the need for discrete emotion annotations in arguments. Across all prompt settings and models, automatic predictions show a high recall but low precision for predicting anger and fear, indicating a strong bias toward negative emotions.
Authors: Maximillian Chen, Ruoxi Sun, Sercan \"O. Ar{\i}k
Abstract: Conversational assistants are increasingly popular across diverse real-world applications, highlighting the need for advanced multimodal speech modeling. Speech, as a natural mode of communication, encodes rich user-specific characteristics such as speaking rate and pitch, making it critical for effective interaction. Our work introduces a data-centric customization approach for efficiently enhancing multimodal understanding in conversational speech modeling. Central to our contributions is a novel multi-task learning paradigm that involves designing auxiliary tasks to utilize a small amount of speech data. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Spoken-SQuAD benchmark, using only 10% of the training data with open-weight models, establishing a robust and efficient framework for audio-centric conversational modeling. We also introduce ASK-QA, the first dataset for multi-turn spoken dialogue with ambiguous user requests and dynamic evaluation inputs. Code and data forthcoming.
Authors: Eddie L. Ungless, Nikolas Vitsakis, Zeerak Talat, James Garforth, Bj\"orn Ross, Arno Onken, Atoosa Kasirzadeh, Alexandra Birch
Abstract: There is a significant body of work looking at the ethical considerations of large language models (LLMs): critiquing tools to measure performance and harms; proposing toolkits to aid in ideation; discussing the risks to workers; considering legislation around privacy and security etc. As yet there is no work that integrates these resources into a single practical guide that focuses on LLMs; we attempt this ambitious goal. We introduce 'LLM Ethics Whitepaper', which we provide as an open and living resource for NLP practitioners, and those tasked with evaluating the ethical implications of others' work. Our goal is to translate ethics literature into concrete recommendations and provocations for thinking with clear first steps, aimed at computer scientists. 'LLM Ethics Whitepaper' distils a thorough literature review into clear Do's and Don'ts, which we present also in this paper. We likewise identify useful toolkits to support ethical work. We refer the interested reader to the full LLM Ethics Whitepaper, which provides a succinct discussion of ethical considerations at each stage in a project lifecycle, as well as citations for the hundreds of papers from which we drew our recommendations. The present paper can be thought of as a pocket guide to conducting ethical research with LLMs.
Authors: Bishwamittra Ghosh, Sarah Hasan, Naheed Anjum Arafat, Arijit Khan
Abstract: In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant success in performing varied natural language tasks such as language translation, question-answering, summarizing, fact-checking, etc. Despite LLMs' impressive ability to generate human-like texts, LLMs are infamous for their inconsistent responses -- a meaning-preserving change in the input query results in an inconsistent response and attributes to vulnerabilities of LLMs such as hallucination, jailbreaking, etc. Consequently, existing research focuses on simple paraphrasing-based consistency assessment of LLMs, and ignores complex queries that necessitates an even better understanding of logical reasoning by an LLM. Our work therefore addresses the logical inconsistency of LLMs under complex logical queries with primitive logical operators, e.g., negation, conjunction, and disjunction. As a test bed, we consider retrieval-augmented LLMs on a fact-checking task involving propositional logic queries from real-world knowledge graphs (KGs). Our contributions are three-fold. Benchmark: We introduce three logical fact-checking datasets over KGs for community development towards logically consistent LLMs. Assessment: We propose consistency measures of LLMs on propositional logic queries as input and demonstrate that existing LLMs lack logical consistency, specially on complex queries. Improvement: We employ supervised fine-tuning to improve the logical consistency of LLMs on the complex fact-checking task with KG contexts.
Authors: Daniil Larionov, Steffen Eger
Abstract: Evaluating the quality of machine-generated natural language content is a challenging task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Recently, large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have been employed for this purpose, but they are computationally expensive due to the extensive token usage required by complex evaluation prompts. In this paper, we propose a prompt optimization approach that uses a smaller, fine-tuned language model to compress input data for evaluation prompt, thus reducing token usage and computational cost when using larger LLMs for downstream evaluation. Our method involves a two-stage fine-tuning process: supervised fine-tuning followed by preference optimization to refine the model's outputs based on human preferences. We focus on Machine Translation (MT) evaluation and utilize the GEMBA-MQM metric as a starting point. Our results show a $2.37\times$ reduction in token usage without any loss in evaluation quality. This work makes state-of-the-art LLM-based metrics like GEMBA-MQM more cost-effective and efficient, enhancing their accessibility for broader use.
Authors: Fuxiang Tao, Bahman Mirheidari, Madhurananda Pahar, Sophie Young, Yao Xiao, Hend Elghazaly, Fritz Peters, Caitlin Illingworth, Dorota Braun, Ronan O'Malley, Simon Bell, Daniel Blackburn, Fasih Haider, Saturnino Luz, Heidi Christensen
Abstract: Dementia is associated with various cognitive impairments and typically manifests only after significant progression, making intervention at this stage often ineffective. To address this issue, the Prediction and Recognition of Cognitive Decline through Spontaneous Speech (PROCESS) Signal Processing Grand Challenge invites participants to focus on early-stage dementia detection. We provide a new spontaneous speech corpus for this challenge. This corpus includes answers from three prompts designed by neurologists to better capture the cognition of speakers. Our baseline models achieved an F1-score of 55.0% on the classification task and an RMSE of 2.98 on the regression task.
Authors: Hankun Kang, Jianhao Chen, Yongqi Li, Xin Miao, Mayi Xu, Ming Zhong, Yuanyuan Zhu, Tieyun Qian
Abstract: Toxicity detection is crucial for maintaining the peace of the society. While existing methods perform well on normal toxic contents or those generated by specific perturbation methods, they are vulnerable to evolving perturbation patterns. However, in real-world scenarios, malicious users tend to create new perturbation patterns for fooling the detectors. For example, some users may circumvent the detector of large language models (LLMs) by adding `I am a scientist' at the beginning of the prompt. In this paper, we introduce a novel problem, i.e., continual learning jailbreak perturbation patterns, into the toxicity detection field. To tackle this problem, we first construct a new dataset generated by 9 types of perturbation patterns, 7 of them are summarized from prior work and 2 of them are developed by us. We then systematically validate the vulnerability of current methods on this new perturbation pattern-aware dataset via both the zero-shot and fine tuned cross-pattern detection. Upon this, we present the domain incremental learning paradigm and the corresponding benchmark to ensure the detector's robustness to dynamically emerging types of perturbed toxic text. Our code and dataset are provided in the appendix and will be publicly available at GitHub, by which we wish to offer new research opportunities for the security-relevant communities.
Authors: Vipula Rawte, Deja N Scott, Gaurav Kumar, Aishneet Juneja, Bharat Sowrya Yaddanapalli, Biplav Srivastava
Abstract: Accurate information is crucial for democracy as it empowers voters to make informed decisions about their representatives and keeping them accountable. In the US, state election commissions (SECs), often required by law, are the primary providers of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) to voters, and secondary sources like non-profits such as League of Women Voters (LWV) try to complement their information shortfall. However, surprisingly, to the best of our knowledge, there is neither a single source with comprehensive FAQs nor a study analyzing the data at national level to identify current practices and ways to improve the status quo. This paper addresses it by providing the {\bf first dataset on Voter FAQs covering all the US states}. Second, we introduce metrics for FAQ information quality (FIQ) with respect to questions, answers, and answers to corresponding questions. Third, we use FIQs to analyze US FAQs to identify leading, mainstream and lagging content practices and corresponding states. Finally, we identify what states across the spectrum can do to improve FAQ quality and thus, the overall information ecosystem. Across all 50 U.S. states, 12% were identified as leaders and 8% as laggards for FIQS\textsubscript{voter}, while 14% were leaders and 12% laggards for FIQS\textsubscript{developer}.
Authors: Atsushi Yamamura, Surya Ganguli
Abstract: The deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in critical decision-making and evaluation processes raises concerns about inherent biases that malicious actors could exploit to distort decision outcomes. We propose a systematic method to reveal such biases in AI evaluation systems and apply it to automated essay grading as an example. Our approach first identifies hidden neural activity patterns that predict distorted decision outcomes and then optimizes an adversarial input suffix to amplify such patterns. We demonstrate that this combination can effectively fool large language model (LLM) graders into assigning much higher grades than humans would. We further show that this white-box attack transfers to black-box attacks on other models, including commercial closed-source models like Gemini. They further reveal the existence of a "magic word" that plays a pivotal role in the efficacy of the attack. We trace the origin of this magic word bias to the structure of commonly-used chat templates for supervised fine-tuning of LLMs and show that a minor change in the template can drastically reduce the bias. This work not only uncovers vulnerabilities in current LLMs but also proposes a systematic method to identify and remove hidden biases, contributing to the goal of ensuring AI safety and security.
Authors: Xiaoning Dong, Wenbo Hu, Wei Xu, Tianxing He
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements across various tasks, but their safety alignment remain a major concern. Exploring jailbreak prompts can expose LLMs' vulnerabilities and guide efforts to secure them. Existing methods primarily design sophisticated instructions for the LLM to follow, or rely on multiple iterations, which could hinder the performance and efficiency of jailbreaks. In this work, we propose a novel jailbreak paradigm, Simple Assistive Task Linkage (SATA), which can effectively circumvent LLM safeguards and elicit harmful responses. Specifically, SATA first masks harmful keywords within a malicious query to generate a relatively benign query containing one or multiple [MASK] special tokens. It then employs a simple assistive task such as a masked language model task or an element lookup by position task to encode the semantics of the masked keywords. Finally, SATA links the assistive task with the masked query to jointly perform the jailbreak. Extensive experiments show that SATA achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms baselines by a large margin. Specifically, on AdvBench dataset, with mask language model (MLM) assistive task, SATA achieves an overall attack success rate (ASR) of 85% and harmful score (HS) of 4.57, and with element lookup by position (ELP) assistive task, SATA attains an overall ASR of 76% and HS of 4.43.
Authors: Austin Stone, Hagen Soltau, Robert Geirhos, Xi Yi, Ye Xia, Bingyi Cao, Kaifeng Chen, Abhijit Ogale, Jonathon Shlens
Abstract: Visual imagery does not consist of solitary objects, but instead reflects the composition of a multitude of fluid concepts. While there have been great advances in visual representation learning, such advances have focused on building better representations for a small number of discrete objects bereft of an understanding of how these objects are interacting. One can observe this limitation in representations learned through captions or contrastive learning -- where the learned model treats an image essentially as a bag of words. Several works have attempted to address this limitation through the development of bespoke learned architectures to directly address the shortcomings in compositional learning. In this work, we focus on simple, and scalable approaches. In particular, we demonstrate that by substantially improving weakly labeled data, i.e. captions, we can vastly improve the performance of standard contrastive learning approaches. Previous CLIP models achieved near chance rate on challenging tasks probing compositional learning. However, our simple approach boosts performance of CLIP substantially and surpasses all bespoke architectures. Furthermore, we showcase our results on a relatively new captioning benchmark derived from DOCCI. We demonstrate through a series of ablations that a standard CLIP model trained with enhanced data may demonstrate impressive performance on image retrieval tasks.
Authors: Niko Moritz, Ruiming Xie, Yashesh Gaur, Ke Li, Simone Merello, Zeeshan Ahmed, Frank Seide, Christian Fuegen
Abstract: We propose the joint speech translation and recognition (JSTAR) model that leverages the fast-slow cascaded encoder architecture for simultaneous end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation (ST). The model is transducer-based and uses a multi-objective training strategy that optimizes both ASR and ST objectives simultaneously. This allows JSTAR to produce high-quality streaming ASR and ST results. We apply JSTAR in a bilingual conversational speech setting with smart-glasses, where the model is also trained to distinguish speech from different directions corresponding to the wearer and a conversational partner. Different model pre-training strategies are studied to further improve results, including training of a transducer-based streaming machine translation (MT) model for the first time and applying it for parameter initialization of JSTAR. We demonstrate superior performances of JSTAR compared to a strong cascaded ST model in both BLEU scores and latency.
Authors: Tianchen Zhang, Gururaj Saileshwar, David Lie
Abstract: This paper demonstrates a new side-channel that enables an adversary to extract sensitive information about inference inputs in large language models (LLMs) based on the number of output tokens in the LLM response. We construct attacks using this side-channel in two common LLM tasks: recovering the target language in machine translation tasks and recovering the output class in classification tasks. In addition, due to the auto-regressive generation mechanism in LLMs, an adversary can recover the output token count reliably using a timing channel, even over the network against a popular closed-source commercial LLM. Our experiments show that an adversary can learn the output language in translation tasks with more than 75% precision across three different models (Tower, M2M100, MBart50). Using this side-channel, we also show the input class in text classification tasks can be leaked out with more than 70% precision from open-source LLMs like Llama-3.1, Llama-3.2, Gemma2, and production models like GPT-4o. Finally, we propose tokenizer-, system-, and prompt-based mitigations against the output token count side-channel.
Authors: Ammar N. Abbas, Csaba Beleznai
Abstract: TalkWithMachines aims to enhance human-robot interaction by contributing to interpretable industrial robotic systems, especially for safety-critical applications. The presented paper investigates recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs), in combination with robotic perception and control. This integration allows robots to understand and execute commands given in natural language and to perceive their environment through visual and/or descriptive inputs. Moreover, translating the LLM's internal states and reasoning into text that humans can easily understand ensures that operators gain a clearer insight into the robot's current state and intentions, which is essential for effective and safe operation. Our paper outlines four LLM-assisted simulated robotic control workflows, which explore (i) low-level control, (ii) the generation of language-based feedback that describes the robot's internal states, (iii) the use of visual information as additional input, and (iv) the use of robot structure information for generating task plans and feedback, taking the robot's physical capabilities and limitations into account. The proposed concepts are presented in a set of experiments, along with a brief discussion. Project description, videos, and supplementary materials will be available on the project website: https://talk-machines.github.io.
Authors: Guoxiang Guo, Aldeida Aleti, Neelofar Neelofar, Chakkrit Tantithamthavorn
Abstract: With the widespread application of LLM-based dialogue systems in daily life, quality assurance has become more important than ever. Recent research has successfully introduced methods to identify unexpected behaviour in single-turn scenarios. However, multi-turn dialogue testing remains underexplored, with the Oracle problem in multi-turn testing posing a persistent challenge for dialogue system developers and researchers. In this paper, we propose MORTAR, a MetamORphic multi-TuRn diAlogue testing appRoach, which mitigates the test oracle problem in the assessment of LLM-based dialogue systems. MORTAR automates the generation of follow-up question-answer (QA) dialogue test cases with multiple dialogue-level perturbations and metamorphic relations. MORTAR employs a novel knowledge graph-based dialogue information model which effectively generates perturbed dialogue test datasets and detects bugs of multi-turn dialogue systems in a low-cost manner. The proposed approach does not require an LLM as a judge, eliminating potential of any biases in the evaluation step. According to the experiment results on multiple LLM-based dialogue systems and comparisons with single-turn metamorphic testing approaches, MORTAR explores more unique bugs in LLM-based dialogue systems, especially for severe bugs that MORTAR detects up to four times more unique bugs than the most effective existing metamorphic testing approach.
Authors: Saleh Momeni, Sahisnu Mazumder, Bing Liu
Abstract: Continual learning (CL) learns a sequence of tasks incrementally. This paper studies the challenging CL setting of class-incremental learning (CIL). CIL has two key challenges: catastrophic forgetting (CF) and inter-task class separation (ICS). Despite numerous proposed methods, these issues remain persistent obstacles. This paper proposes a novel CIL method, called Kernel Linear Discriminant Analysis (KLDA), that can effectively avoid CF and ICS problems. It leverages only the powerful features learned in a foundation model (FM). However, directly using these features proves suboptimal. To address this, KLDA incorporates the Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel and its Random Fourier Features (RFF) to enhance the feature representations from the FM, leading to improved performance. When a new task arrives, KLDA computes only the mean for each class in the task and updates a shared covariance matrix for all learned classes based on the kernelized features. Classification is performed using Linear Discriminant Analysis. Our empirical evaluation using text and image classification datasets demonstrates that KLDA significantly outperforms baselines. Remarkably, without relying on replay data, KLDA achieves accuracy comparable to joint training of all classes, which is considered the upper bound for CIL performance. The KLDA code is available at https://github.com/salehmomeni/klda.
Authors: Xingchen Song, Chengdong Liang, Binbin Zhang, Pengshen Zhang, ZiYu Wang, Youcheng Ma, Menglong Xu, Lin Wang, Di Wu, Fuping Pan, Dinghao Zhou, Zhendong Peng
Abstract: Large Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models demand a vast number of parameters, copious amounts of data, and significant computational resources during the training process. However, such models can merely be deployed on high-compute cloud platforms and are only capable of performing speech recognition tasks. This leads to high costs and restricted capabilities. In this report, we initially propose the elastic mixture of the expert (eMoE) model. This model can be trained just once and then be elastically scaled in accordance with deployment requirements. Secondly, we devise an unsupervised data creation and validation procedure and gather millions of hours of audio data from diverse domains for training. Using these two techniques, our system achieves elastic deployment capabilities while reducing the Character Error Rate (CER) on the SpeechIO testsets from 4.98\% to 2.45\%. Thirdly, our model is not only competent in Mandarin speech recognition but also proficient in multilingual, multi-dialect, emotion, gender, and sound event perception. We refer to this as Automatic Speech Perception (ASP), and the perception results are presented in the experimental section.
Authors: Guancheng Zeng, Wentao Ding, Beining Xu, Chi Zhang, Wenqiang Han, Gang Li, Jingjing Mo, Pengxu Qiu, Xinran Tao, Wang Tao, Haowen Hu
Abstract: Enterprises possess a vast array of API assets scattered across various functions, forming the backbone of existing business processes. By leveraging these APIs as functional tools, enterprises can design diverse, scenario-specific agent applications, driven by on-premise function-calling models as the core engine. However, generic models often fail to meet enterprise requirements in terms of computational efficiency, output accuracy, and stability, necessitating scenario-specific adaptation. In this paper, we propose a training pipeline for function-calling capabilities tailored to real-world business scenarios. This pipeline includes the synthesis and augmentation of scenario-specific function-calling data, model fine-tuning, and performance evaluation and analysis. Using this pipeline, we generated 1,260 fully AI-generated samples and 1,035 augmented manually-labeled samples in digital HR agent scenario. The Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct model was employed as the base model and fine-tuned using the LoRA method on four GPUs with 24GB VRAM. Our fine-tuned model demonstrated outstanding performance in evaluations and practical applications, surpassing GPT-4 and GPT-4o in accuracy on the test set. These results validate the reliability of the proposed pipeline for training scenario-specific function-calling models.
Authors: Yijia Shao, Vinay Samuel, Yucheng Jiang, John Yang, Diyi Yang
Abstract: Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have sparked growing interest in developing LM agents. While fully autonomous agents could excel in many scenarios, numerous use cases inherently require them to collaborate with humans due to humans' latent preferences, domain expertise, or need for control. To facilitate the study of human-agent collaboration, we present Collaborative Gym (Co-Gym), a general framework enabling asynchronous, tripartite interaction among agents, humans, and task environments. We instantiate Co-Gym with three representative tasks in both simulated and real-world conditions, and propose an evaluation framework that assesses both the collaboration outcomes and processes. Our findings reveal that collaborative agents consistently outperform their fully autonomous counterparts in task performance within those delivered cases, achieving win rates of 86% in Travel Planning, 74% in Tabular Analysis, and 66% in Related Work when evaluated by real users. However, our study also highlights significant challenges in developing collaborative agents, requiring advancements in core aspects of intelligence -- communication capabilities, situational awareness, and balancing autonomy and human control.
Authors: Huatao Xu, Panron Tong, Mo Li, Mani Srivastava
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel mobile sensing application - life journaling - designed to generate semantic descriptions of users' daily lives. We present AutoLife, an automatic life journaling system based on commercial smartphones. AutoLife only inputs low-cost sensor data (without photos or audio) from smartphones and can automatically generate comprehensive life journals for users. To achieve this, we first derive time, motion, and location contexts from multimodal sensor data, and harness the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), enriched with commonsense knowledge about human lives, to interpret diverse contexts and generate life journals. To manage the task complexity and long sensing duration, a multilayer framework is proposed, which decomposes tasks and seamlessly integrates LLMs with other techniques for life journaling. This study establishes a real-life dataset as a benchmark and extensive experiment results demonstrate that AutoLife produces accurate and reliable life journals.
Authors: Tengfei Ma, Yujie Chen, Liang Wang, Xuan Lin, Bosheng Song, Xiangxiang Zeng
Abstract: Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) aims to infer missing facts between newly emerged entities within knowledge graphs (KGs), posing a significant challenge. While recent studies have shown promising results in inferring such entities through knowledge subgraph reasoning, they suffer from (i) the semantic inconsistencies of similar relations, and (ii) noisy interactions inherent in KGs due to the presence of unconvincing knowledge for emerging entities. To address these challenges, we propose a Semantic Structure-aware Denoising Network (S$^2$DN) for inductive KGC. Our goal is to learn adaptable general semantics and reliable structures to distill consistent semantic knowledge while preserving reliable interactions within KGs. Specifically, we introduce a semantic smoothing module over the enclosing subgraphs to retain the universal semantic knowledge of relations. We incorporate a structure refining module to filter out unreliable interactions and offer additional knowledge, retaining robust structure surrounding target links. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark KGs demonstrate that S$^2$DN surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art models. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of S$^2$DN in preserving semantic consistency and enhancing the robustness of filtering out unreliable interactions in contaminated KGs.
Authors: Tornike Tsereteli, Daniel Ruffinelli, Simone Paolo Ponzetto
Abstract: Questions within surveys, called survey items, are used in the social sciences to study latent concepts, such as the factors influencing life satisfaction. Instead of using explicit citations, researchers paraphrase the content of the survey items they use in-text. However, this makes it challenging to find survey items of interest when comparing related work. Automatically parsing and linking these implicit mentions to survey items in a knowledge base can provide more fine-grained references. We model this task, called Survey Item Linking (SIL), in two stages: mention detection and entity disambiguation. Due to an imprecise definition of the task, existing datasets used for evaluating the performance for SIL are too small and of low-quality. We argue that latent concepts and survey item mentions should be differentiated. To this end, we create a high-quality and richly annotated dataset consisting of 20,454 English and German sentences. By benchmarking deep learning systems for each of the two stages independently and sequentially, we demonstrate that the task is feasible, but observe that errors propagate from the first stage, leading to a lower overall task performance. Moreover, mentions that require the context of multiple sentences are more challenging to identify for models in the first stage. Modeling the entire context of a document and combining the two stages into an end-to-end system could mitigate these problems in future work, and errors could additionally be reduced by collecting more diverse data and by improving the quality of the knowledge base. The data and code are available at https://github.com/e-tornike/SIL .
Authors: Jiaming Ji, Jiayi Zhou, Hantao Lou, Boyuan Chen, Donghai Hong, Xuyao Wang, Wenqi Chen, Kaile Wang, Rui Pan, Jiahao Li, Mohan Wang, Josef Dai, Tianyi Qiu, Hua Xu, Dong Li, Weipeng Chen, Jun Song, Bo Zheng, Yaodong Yang
Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in enhancing the instruction-following capabilities of large language models; however, it remains underexplored in the cross-modality domain. As the number of modalities increases, aligning all-modality models with human intentions -- such as instruction following -- becomes a pressing challenge. In this work, we make the first attempt to fine-tune all-modality models (i.e. input and output with any modality, also named any-to-any models) using human preference data across all modalities (including text, image, audio, and video), ensuring its behavior aligns with human intentions. This endeavor presents several challenges. First, there is no large-scale all-modality human preference data in existing open-source resources, as most datasets are limited to specific modalities, predominantly text and image. Secondly, the effectiveness of binary preferences in RLHF for post-training alignment in complex all-modality scenarios remains an unexplored area. Finally, there is a lack of a systematic framework to evaluate the capabilities of all-modality models, particularly regarding modality selection and synergy. To address these challenges, we propose the align-anything framework, which includes meticulously annotated 200k all-modality human preference data. Then, we introduce an alignment method that learns from unified language feedback, effectively capturing complex modality-specific human preferences and enhancing the model's instruction-following capabilities. Furthermore, to assess performance improvements in all-modality models after post-training alignment, we construct a challenging all-modality capability evaluation framework -- eval-anything. All data, models, and code frameworks have been open-sourced for the community. For more details, please refer to https://github.com/PKU-Alignment/align-anything.
Authors: Hasan Md Tusfiqur Alam, Devansh Srivastav, Md Abdul Kadir, Daniel Sonntag
Abstract: Deep learning has advanced medical image classification, but interpretability challenges hinder its clinical adoption. This study enhances interpretability in Chest X-ray (CXR) classification by using concept bottleneck models (CBMs) and a multi-agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for report generation. By modeling relationships between visual features and clinical concepts, we create interpretable concept vectors that guide a multi-agent RAG system to generate radiology reports, enhancing clinical relevance, explainability, and transparency. Evaluation of the generated reports using an LLM-as-a-judge confirmed the interpretability and clinical utility of our model's outputs. On the COVID-QU dataset, our model achieved 81% classification accuracy and demonstrated robust report generation performance, with five key metrics ranging between 84% and 90%. This interpretable multi-agent framework bridges the gap between high-performance AI and the explainability required for reliable AI-driven CXR analysis in clinical settings.
Authors: Seyedreza Mohseni, Seyedali Mohammadi, Deepa Tilwani, Yash Saxena, Gerald Ndwula, Sriram Vema, Edward Raff, Manas Gaur
Abstract: Malware authors often employ code obfuscations to make their malware harder to detect. Existing tools for generating obfuscated code often require access to the original source code (e.g., C++ or Java), and adding new obfuscations is a non-trivial, labor-intensive process. In this study, we ask the following question: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) potentially generate a new obfuscated assembly code? If so, this poses a risk to anti-virus engines and potentially increases the flexibility of attackers to create new obfuscation patterns. We answer this in the affirmative by developing the MetamorphASM benchmark comprising MetamorphASM Dataset (MAD) along with three code obfuscation techniques: dead code, register substitution, and control flow change. The MetamorphASM systematically evaluates the ability of LLMs to generate and analyze obfuscated code using MAD, which contains 328,200 obfuscated assembly code samples. We release this dataset and analyze the success rate of various LLMs (e.g., GPT-3.5/4, GPT-4o-mini, Starcoder, CodeGemma, CodeLlama, CodeT5, and LLaMA 3.1) in generating obfuscated assembly code. The evaluation was performed using established information-theoretic metrics and manual human review to ensure correctness and provide the foundation for researchers to study and develop remediations to this risk. The source code can be found at the following GitHub link: https://github.com/mohammadi-ali/MetamorphASM.
Authors: Huaijie Wang, Shibo Hao, Hanze Dong, Shenao Zhang, Yilin Bao, Ziran Yang, Yi Wu
Abstract: Improving the multi-step reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) with offline reinforcement learning (RL) is essential for quickly adapting them to complex tasks. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown promise in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it is less suitable for multi-step reasoning tasks because (1) DPO relies on paired preference data, which is not readily available for multi-step reasoning tasks, and (2) it treats all tokens uniformly, making it ineffective for credit assignment in multi-step reasoning tasks, which often come with sparse reward. In this work, we propose OREO (Offline Reasoning Optimization), an offline RL method for enhancing LLM multi-step reasoning. Building on insights from previous works of maximum entropy reinforcement learning, it jointly learns a policy model and value function by optimizing the soft Bellman Equation. We show in principle that it reduces the need to collect pairwise data and enables better credit assignment. Empirically, OREO surpasses existing offline learning methods on multi-step reasoning benchmarks, including mathematical reasoning tasks (GSM8K, MATH) and embodied agent control (ALFWorld). The approach can be extended to a multi-iteration framework when additional resources are available. Furthermore, the learned value function can be leveraged to guide the tree search for free, which can further boost performance during test time.
Authors: Imed Keraghel, Stanislas Morbieu, Mohamed Nadif
Abstract: Named Entity Recognition seeks to extract substrings within a text that name real-world objects and to determine their type (for example, whether they refer to persons or organizations). In this survey, we first present an overview of recent popular approaches, including advancements in Transformer-based methods and Large Language Models (LLMs) that have not had much coverage in other surveys. In addition, we discuss reinforcement learning and graph-based approaches, highlighting their role in enhancing NER performance. Second, we focus on methods designed for datasets with scarce annotations. Third, we evaluate the performance of the main NER implementations on a variety of datasets with differing characteristics (as regards their domain, their size, and their number of classes). We thus provide a deep comparison of algorithms that have never been considered together. Our experiments shed some light on how the characteristics of datasets affect the behavior of the methods we compare.
Authors: Emily Lin, Jian Sun, Hsingyu Chen, Mohammad H. Mahoor
Abstract: Suicide remains a pressing global health concern, necessitating innovative approaches for early detection and intervention. This paper focuses on identifying suicidal intentions in posts from the SuicideWatch subreddit by proposing a novel deep-learning approach that utilizes the state-of-the-art RoBERTa-CNN model. The robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa) excels at capturing textual nuances and forming semantic relationships within the text. The remaining Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) head enhances RoBERTa's capacity to discern critical patterns from extensive datasets. To evaluate RoBERTa-CNN, we conducted experiments on the Suicide and Depression Detection dataset, yielding promising results. For instance, RoBERTa-CNN achieves a mean accuracy of 98% with a standard deviation (STD) of 0.0009. Additionally, we found that data quality significantly impacts the training of a robust model. To improve data quality, we removed noise from the text data while preserving its contextual content through either manually cleaning or utilizing the OpenAI API.
Authors: Rahul Zalkikar, Kanchan Chandra
Abstract: Innovative transformer-based language models produce contextually-aware token embeddings and have achieved state-of-the-art performance for a variety of natural language tasks, but have been shown to encode unwanted biases for downstream applications. In this paper, we evaluate the social biases encoded by transformers trained with the masked language modeling objective using proposed proxy functions within an iterative masking experiment to measure the quality of transformer models' predictions, and assess the preference of MLMs towards disadvantaged and advantaged groups. We compare bias estimations with those produced by other evaluation methods using benchmark datasets and assess their alignment with human annotated biases. We find relatively high religious and disability biases across considered MLMs and low gender bias in one dataset relative to another. We extend on previous work by evaluating social biases introduced after retraining an MLM under the masked language modeling objective, and find that proposed measures produce more accurate estimations of biases introduced by retraining MLMs than others based on relative preference for biased sentences between models.
Authors: Xuemei Tang, Jun Wang
Abstract: Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been successful in relational extraction (RE) tasks, especially in the few-shot learning. An important problem in the field of RE is long-tailed data, while not much attention is paid to this problem using LLM approaches. Therefore, in this paper, we propose SLCoLM, a model collaboration framework, to mitigate the data long-tail problem. In our framework, we use the ``\textit{Training-Guide-Predict}'' strategy to combine the strengths of small pre-trained language models (SLMs) and LLMs, where a task-specific SLM framework acts as a guider, transfers task knowledge to the LLM and guides the LLM in performing RE tasks. Our experiments on an ancient Chinese RE dataset rich in relation types show that the approach facilitates RE of long-tail relation types.
Authors: Thomas R. Shultz, Jamie M. Wise, Ardavan Salehi Nobandegani
Abstract: We examine whether a leading AI system GPT4 understands text as well as humans do, first using a well-established standardized test of discourse comprehension. On this test, GPT4 performs slightly, but not statistically significantly, better than humans given the very high level of human performance. Both GPT4 and humans make correct inferences about information that is not explicitly stated in the text, a critical test of understanding. Next, we use more difficult passages to determine whether that could allow larger differences between GPT4 and humans. GPT4 does considerably better on this more difficult text than do the high school and university students for whom these the text passages are designed, as admission tests of student reading comprehension. Deeper exploration of GPT4 performance on material from one of these admission tests reveals generally accepted signatures of genuine understanding, namely generalization and inference.
Authors: Qinglin Zhu, Runcong Zhao, Jinhua Du, Lin Gui, Yulan He
Abstract: We present Questum, a novel framework for Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents in Murder Mystery Games (MMGs). MMGs pose unique challenges, including undefined state spaces, absent intermediate rewards, and the need for strategic interaction in a continuous language domain. Questum addresses these complexities through a sensor-based representation of agent states, a question-targeting mechanism guided by information gain, and a pruning strategy to refine suspect lists and enhance decision-making efficiency. To enable systematic evaluation, we propose WellPlay, a dataset comprising 1,482 inferential questions across 12 games, categorised into objectives, reasoning, and relationships. Experiments demonstrate Questum's capacity to achieve superior performance in reasoning accuracy and efficiency compared to existing approaches, while also significantly improving the quality of agent-human interactions in MMGs. This study advances the development of reasoning agents for complex social and interactive scenarios.
Authors: Bernal Jim\'enez Guti\'errez, Yiheng Shu, Yu Gu, Michihiro Yasunaga, Yu Su
Abstract: In order to thrive in hostile and ever-changing natural environments, mammalian brains evolved to store large amounts of knowledge about the world and continually integrate new information while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Despite the impressive accomplishments, large language models (LLMs), even with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), still struggle to efficiently and effectively integrate a large amount of new experiences after pre-training. In this work, we introduce HippoRAG, a novel retrieval framework inspired by the hippocampal indexing theory of human long-term memory to enable deeper and more efficient knowledge integration over new experiences. HippoRAG synergistically orchestrates LLMs, knowledge graphs, and the Personalized PageRank algorithm to mimic the different roles of neocortex and hippocampus in human memory. We compare HippoRAG with existing RAG methods on multi-hop question answering and show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods remarkably, by up to 20%. Single-step retrieval with HippoRAG achieves comparable or better performance than iterative retrieval like IRCoT while being 10-30 times cheaper and 6-13 times faster, and integrating HippoRAG into IRCoT brings further substantial gains. Finally, we show that our method can tackle new types of scenarios that are out of reach of existing methods. Code and data are available at https://github.com/OSU-NLP-Group/HippoRAG.
Authors: Jiaming Ji, Kaile Wang, Tianyi Qiu, Boyuan Chen, Jiayi Zhou, Changye Li, Hantao Lou, Josef Dai, Yunhuai Liu, Yaodong Yang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) may exhibit unintended or undesirable behaviors. Recent works have concentrated on aligning LLMs to mitigate harmful outputs. Despite these efforts, some anomalies indicate that even a well-conducted alignment process can be easily circumvented, whether intentionally or accidentally. Does alignment fine-tuning yield have robust effects on models, or are its impacts merely superficial? In this work, we make the first exploration of this phenomenon from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Empirically, we demonstrate the elasticity of post-alignment models, i.e., the tendency to revert to the behavior distribution formed during the pre-training phase upon further fine-tuning. Leveraging compression theory, we formally deduce that fine-tuning disproportionately undermines alignment relative to pre-training, potentially by orders of magnitude. We validate the presence of elasticity through experiments on models of varying types and scales. Specifically, we find that model performance declines rapidly before reverting to the pre-training distribution, after which the rate of decline drops significantly. Furthermore, we further reveal that elasticity positively correlates with the increased model size and the expansion of pre-training data. Our findings underscore the need to address the inherent elasticity of LLMs to mitigate their resistance to alignment.
Authors: Viktor Moskvoretskii, Nazarii Tupitsa, Chris Biemann, Samuel Horv\'ath, Eduard Gorbunov, Irina Nikishina
Abstract: We present a new approach called MeritOpt based on the Personalized Federated Learning algorithm MeritFed that can be applied to Natural Language Tasks with heterogeneous data. We evaluate it on the Low-Resource Machine Translation task, using the datasets of South East Asian and Finno-Ugric languages. In addition to its effectiveness, MeritOpt is also highly interpretable, as it can be applied to track the impact of each language used for training. Our analysis reveals that target dataset size affects weight distribution across auxiliary languages, that unrelated languages do not interfere with the training, and auxiliary optimizer parameters have minimal impact. Our approach is easy to apply with a few lines of code, and we provide scripts for reproducing the experiments at https://github.com/VityaVitalich/MeritOpt.
Authors: Jiho Kim, Woosog Chay, Hyeonji Hwang, Daeun Kyung, Hyunseung Chung, Eunbyeol Cho, Yohan Jo, Edward Choi
Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the capabilities of conversational agents, making them applicable to various fields (e.g., education). Despite their progress, the evaluation of the agents often overlooks the complexities of real-world conversations, such as real-time interactions, multi-party dialogues, and extended contextual dependencies. To bridge this gap, we introduce DialSim, a real-time dialogue simulator. In this simulator, an agent is assigned the role of a character from popular TV shows, requiring it to respond to spontaneous questions using past dialogue information and to distinguish between known and unknown information. Key features of DialSim include assessing the agent's ability to respond within a reasonable time limit, handling long-term multi-party dialogues, and evaluating performance under randomized questioning with LongDialQA, a novel, high-quality question-answering dataset. Our experiments using DialSim reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the latest conversational agents, offering valuable insights for future advancements in conversational AI. DialSim is available at https://dialsim.github.io/.
Authors: Xiaowei Yuan, Zhao Yang, Yequan Wang, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
Abstract: In the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as effective Query Likelihood Models (QLMs) in an unsupervised way, which re-rank documents based on the probability of generating the query given the content of a document. However, directly prompting LLMs to approximate QLMs inherently is biased, where the estimated distribution might diverge from the actual document-specific distribution. In this study, we introduce a novel framework, $\mathrm{UR^3}$, which leverages Bayesian decision theory to both quantify and mitigate this estimation bias. Specifically, $\mathrm{UR^3}$ reformulates the problem as maximizing the probability of document generation, thereby harmonizing the optimization of query and document generation probabilities under a unified risk minimization objective. Our empirical results indicate that $\mathrm{UR^3}$ significantly enhances re-ranking, particularly in improving the Top-1 accuracy. It benefits the QA tasks by achieving higher accuracy with fewer input documents.
Authors: Zhongshen Zeng, Yinhong Liu, Yingjia Wan, Jingyao Li, Pengguang Chen, Jianbo Dai, Yuxuan Yao, Rongwu Xu, Zehan Qi, Wanru Zhao, Linling Shen, Jianqiao Lu, Haochen Tan, Yukang Chen, Hao Zhang, Zhan Shi, Bailin Wang, Zhijiang Guo, Jiaya Jia
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing capability in problem-solving and decision-making, largely based on the step-by-step chain-of-thought reasoning processes. However, evaluating these reasoning abilities has become increasingly challenging. Existing outcome-based benchmarks are beginning to saturate, becoming less effective in tracking meaningful progress. To address this, we present a process-based benchmark MR-Ben that demands a meta-reasoning skill, where LMs are asked to locate and analyse potential errors in automatically generated reasoning steps. Our meta-reasoning paradigm is especially suited for system-2 slow thinking, mirroring the human cognitive process of carefully examining assumptions, conditions, calculations, and logic to identify mistakes.MR-Ben comprises 5,975 questions curated by human experts across a wide range of subjects, including physics, chemistry, logic, coding, and more. Through our designed metrics for assessing meta-reasoning on this benchmark, we identify interesting limitations and weaknesses of current LLMs (open-source and closed-source models). For example, with models like the o1 series from OpenAI demonstrating strong performance by effectively scrutinizing the solution space, many other state-of-the-art models fall significantly behind on MR-Ben, exposing potential shortcomings in their training strategies and inference methodologies.
Authors: Brevin Franklin, Emily Silcock, Abhishek Arora, Tom Bryan, Melissa Dell
Abstract: Social scientists and the general public often analyze contemporary events by drawing parallels with the past, a process complicated by the vast, noisy, and unstructured nature of historical texts. For example, hundreds of millions of page scans from historical newspapers have been noisily transcribed. Traditional sparse methods for searching for relevant material in these vast corpora, e.g., with keywords, can be brittle given complex vocabularies and OCR noise. This study introduces News Deja Vu, a novel semantic search tool that leverages transformer large language models and a bi-encoder approach to identify historical news articles that are most similar to modern news queries. News Deja Vu first recognizes and masks entities, in order to focus on broader parallels rather than the specific named entities being discussed. Then, a contrastively trained, lightweight bi-encoder retrieves historical articles that are most similar semantically to a modern query, illustrating how phenomena that might seem unique to the present have varied historical precedents. Aimed at social scientists, the user-friendly News Deja Vu package is designed to be accessible for those who lack extensive familiarity with deep learning. It works with large text datasets, and we show how it can be deployed to a massive scale corpus of historical, open-source news articles. While human expertise remains important for drawing deeper insights, News Deja Vu provides a powerful tool for exploring parallels in how people have perceived past and present.
Authors: Peyman Hosseini, Ignacio Castro, Iacopo Ghinassi, Matthew Purver
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehending and analyzing lengthy sequential inputs, owing to their extensive context windows that allow processing millions of tokens in a single forward pass. However, this paper uncovers a surprising limitation: LLMs fall short when handling long input sequences. We investigate this issue using three datasets and two tasks (sentiment analysis and news categorization) across various LLMs, including Claude 3, Gemini Pro, GPT 3.5 Turbo, Llama 3 Instruct, and Mistral Instruct models. To address this limitation, we propose and evaluate ad-hoc solutions that substantially enhance LLMs' performance on long input sequences by up to 50%, while reducing API cost and latency by up to 93% and 50%, respectively.
Authors: Jiaqing Liu, Chong Deng, Qinglin Zhang, Shilin Zhou, Qian Chen, Hai Yu, Wen Wang
Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts exhibit recognition errors and various spoken language phenomena such as disfluencies, ungrammatical sentences, and incomplete sentences, hence suffering from poor readability. To improve readability, we propose a Contextualized Spoken-to-Written conversion (CoS2W) task to address ASR and grammar errors and also transfer the informal text into the formal style with content preserved, utilizing contexts and auxiliary information. This task naturally matches the in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). To facilitate comprehensive comparisons of various LLMs, we construct a document-level Spoken-to-Written conversion of ASR Transcripts Benchmark (SWAB) dataset. Using SWAB, we study the impact of different granularity levels on the CoS2W performance, and propose methods to exploit contexts and auxiliary information to enhance the outputs. Experimental results reveal that LLMs have the potential to excel in the CoS2W task, particularly in grammaticality and formality, our methods achieve effective understanding of contexts and auxiliary information by LLMs. We further investigate the effectiveness of using LLMs as evaluators and find that LLM evaluators show strong correlations with human evaluations on rankings of faithfulness and formality, which validates the reliability of LLM evaluators for the CoS2W task.
Authors: Dingkang Yang, Dongling Xiao, Jinjie Wei, Mingcheng Li, Zhaoyu Chen, Ke Li, Lihua Zhang
Abstract: Despite their remarkable capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generate responses that contradict verifiable facts, i.e., unfaithful hallucination content. Existing efforts generally focus on optimizing model parameters or editing semantic representations, which compromise the internal factual knowledge of target LLMs. In addition, hallucinations typically exhibit multifaceted patterns in downstream tasks, limiting the model's holistic performance across tasks. In this paper, we propose a Comparator-driven Decoding-Time (CDT) framework to alleviate the response hallucination. Firstly, we construct hallucinatory and truthful comparators with multi-task fine-tuning samples. In this case, we present an instruction prototype-guided mixture of experts strategy to enhance the ability of the corresponding comparators to capture different hallucination or truthfulness patterns in distinct task instructions. CDT constrains next-token predictions to factuality-robust distributions by contrasting the logit differences between the target LLMs and these comparators. Systematic experiments on multiple downstream tasks show that our framework can significantly improve the model performance and response factuality.
Authors: Jangyeong Jeon, Sangyeon Cho, Minuk Ma, Junyoung Kim
Abstract: This paper examines the Code-Switching (CS) phenomenon where two languages intertwine within a single utterance. There exists a noticeable need for research on the CS between English and Korean. We highlight that the current Equivalence Constraint (EC) theory for CS in other languages may only partially capture English-Korean CS complexities due to the intrinsic grammatical differences between the languages. We introduce a novel Koglish dataset tailored for English-Korean CS scenarios to mitigate such challenges. First, we constructed the Koglish-GLUE dataset to demonstrate the importance and need for CS datasets in various tasks. We found the differential outcomes of various foundation multilingual language models when trained on a monolingual versus a CS dataset. Motivated by this, we hypothesized that SimCSE, which has shown strengths in monolingual sentence embedding, would have limitations in CS scenarios. We construct a novel Koglish-NLI (Natural Language Inference) dataset using a CS augmentation-based approach to verify this. From this CS-augmented dataset Koglish-NLI, we propose a unified contrastive learning and augmentation method for code-switched embeddings, ConCSE, highlighting the semantics of CS sentences. Experimental results validate the proposed ConCSE with an average performance enhancement of 1.77\% on the Koglish-STS(Semantic Textual Similarity) tasks.
Authors: Lihu Chen, Ga\"el Varoquaux
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI), leading to the development of increasingly large models such as GPT-4 and LLaMA-405B. However, scaling up model sizes results in exponentially higher computational costs and energy consumption, making these models impractical for academic researchers and businesses with limited resources. At the same time, Small Models (SMs) are frequently used in practical settings, although their significance is currently underestimated. This raises important questions about the role of small models in the era of LLMs, a topic that has received limited attention in prior research. In this work, we systematically examine the relationship between LLMs and SMs from two key perspectives: Collaboration and Competition. We hope this survey provides valuable insights for practitioners, fostering a deeper understanding of the contribution of small models and promoting more efficient use of computational resources. The code is available at https://github.com/tigerchen52/role_of_small_models
Authors: Haoran Ye, Yuhang Xie, Yuanyi Ren, Hanjun Fang, Xin Zhang, Guojie Song
Abstract: Human values and their measurement are long-standing interdisciplinary inquiry. Recent advances in AI have sparked renewed interest in this area, with large language models (LLMs) emerging as both tools and subjects of value measurement. This work introduces Generative Psychometrics for Values (GPV), an LLM-based, data-driven value measurement paradigm, theoretically grounded in text-revealed selective perceptions. The core idea is to dynamically parse unstructured texts into perceptions akin to static stimuli in traditional psychometrics, measure the value orientations they reveal, and aggregate the results. Applying GPV to human-authored blogs, we demonstrate its stability, validity, and superiority over prior psychological tools. Then, extending GPV to LLM value measurement, we advance the current art with 1) a psychometric methodology that measures LLM values based on their scalable and free-form outputs, enabling context-specific measurement; 2) a comparative analysis of measurement paradigms, indicating response biases of prior methods; and 3) an attempt to bridge LLM values and their safety, revealing the predictive power of different value systems and the impacts of various values on LLM safety. Through interdisciplinary efforts, we aim to leverage AI for next-generation psychometrics and psychometrics for value-aligned AI.
Authors: Ximing Wen, Wenjuan Tan, Rosina O. Weber
Abstract: Pretrained transformer-based Language Models (LMs) are well-known for their ability to achieve significant improvement on text classification tasks with their powerful word embeddings, but their black-box nature, which leads to a lack of interpretability, has been a major concern. In this work, we introduce GAProtoNet, a novel white-box Multi-head Graph Attention-based Prototypical Network designed to explain the decisions of text classification models built with LM encoders. In our approach, the input vector and prototypes are regarded as nodes within a graph, and we utilize multi-head graph attention to selectively construct edges between the input node and prototype nodes to learn an interpretable prototypical representation. During inference, the model makes decisions based on a linear combination of activated prototypes weighted by the attention score assigned for each prototype, allowing its choices to be transparently explained by the attention weights and the prototypes projected into the closest matching training examples. Experiments on multiple public datasets show our approach achieves superior results without sacrificing the accuracy of the original black-box LMs. We also compare with four alternative prototypical network variations and our approach achieves the best accuracy and F1 among all. Our case study and visualization of prototype clusters also demonstrate the efficiency in explaining the decisions of black-box models built with LMs.
Authors: Zhe Li, Wei Zhao, Yige Li, Jun Sun
Abstract: Influence functions are important for quantifying the impact of individual training data points on a model's predictions. Although extensive research has been conducted on influence functions in traditional machine learning models, their application to large language models (LLMs) has been limited. In this work, we conduct a systematic study to address a key question: do influence functions work on LLMs? Specifically, we evaluate influence functions across multiple tasks and find that they consistently perform poorly in most settings. Our further investigation reveals that their poor performance can be attributed to: (1) inevitable approximation errors when estimating the iHVP component due to the scale of LLMs, (2) uncertain convergence during fine-tuning, and, more fundamentally, (3) the definition itself, as changes in model parameters do not necessarily correlate with changes in LLM behavior. Thus, our study suggests the need for alternative approaches for identifying influential samples.
Authors: Runchuan Zhu, Zhipeng Ma, Jiang Wu, Junyuan Gao, Jiaqi Wang, Dahua Lin, Conghui He
Abstract: Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (RAIT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to refuse to answer unknown questions. By modifying responses of unknown questions in the training data to refusal responses such as "I don't know", RAIT enhances the reliability of LLMs and reduces their hallucination. Generally, RAIT modifies training samples based on the correctness of the initial LLM's response. However, this crude approach can cause LLMs to excessively refuse answering questions they could have correctly answered, the problem we call over-refusal. In this paper, we explore two primary causes of over-refusal: Static conflict occurs when similar samples within the LLM's feature space receive differing supervision signals (original vs. modified "I don't know"). Dynamic conflict arises as the LLM's evolving knowledge during SFT enables it to answer previously unanswerable questions, but the now-answerable training samples still retain the original "I don't know" supervision signals from the initial LLM state, leading to inconsistencies. These conflicts cause the trained LLM to misclassify known questions as unknown, resulting in over-refusal. To address this issue, we introduce Certainty Represented Knowledge Flow for Refusal-Aware Instructions Tuning (CRaFT). CRaFT centers on two main contributions: First, we additionally incorporate response certainty to selectively filter and modify data, reducing static conflicts. Second, we implement preliminary rehearsal training to characterize changes in the LLM's knowledge state, which helps mitigate dynamic conflicts during the fine-tuning process. We conducted extensive experiments on open-ended question answering and multiple-choice question task. Experiment results show that CRaFT can improve LLM's overall performance during the RAIT process. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/opendatalab/CRaFT .
Authors: Jun Shern Chan, Neil Chowdhury, Oliver Jaffe, James Aung, Dane Sherburn, Evan Mays, Giulio Starace, Kevin Liu, Leon Maksin, Tejal Patwardhan, Lilian Weng, Aleksander M\k{a}dry
Abstract: We introduce MLE-bench, a benchmark for measuring how well AI agents perform at machine learning engineering. To this end, we curate 75 ML engineering-related competitions from Kaggle, creating a diverse set of challenging tasks that test real-world ML engineering skills such as training models, preparing datasets, and running experiments. We establish human baselines for each competition using Kaggle's publicly available leaderboards. We use open-source agent scaffolds to evaluate several frontier language models on our benchmark, finding that the best-performing setup--OpenAI's o1-preview with AIDE scaffolding--achieves at least the level of a Kaggle bronze medal in 16.9% of competitions. In addition to our main results, we investigate various forms of resource scaling for AI agents and the impact of contamination from pre-training. We open-source our benchmark code (github.com/openai/mle-bench/) to facilitate future research in understanding the ML engineering capabilities of AI agents.
Authors: Gilad Gressel, Rahul Pankajakshan, Yisroel Mirsky
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated an alarming ability to impersonate humans in conversation, raising concerns about their potential misuse in scams and deception. Humans have a right to know if they are conversing to an LLM. We evaluate text-based prompts designed as challenges to expose LLM imposters in real-time. To this end we compile and release an open-source benchmark dataset that includes 'implicit challenges' that exploit an LLM's instruction-following mechanism to cause role deviation, and 'exlicit challenges' that test an LLM's ability to perform simple tasks typically easy for humans but difficult for LLMs. Our evaluation of 9 leading models from the LMSYS leaderboard revealed that explicit challenges successfully detected LLMs in 78.4% of cases, while implicit challenges were effective in 22.9% of instances. User studies validate the real-world applicability of our methods, with humans outperforming LLMs on explicit challenges (78% vs 22% success rate). Our framework unexpectedly revealed that many study participants were using LLMs to complete tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting both AI impostors and human misuse of AI tools. This work addresses the critical need for reliable, real-time LLM detection methods in high-stakes conversations.
Authors: Zhiyuan Peng, Jinming Nian, Alexandre Evfimievski, Yi Fang
Abstract: Conversational AI agents use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to provide verifiable document-grounded responses to user inquiries. However, many natural questions do not have good answers: about 25\% contain false assumptions~\cite{Yu2023:CREPE}, and over 50\% are ambiguous~\cite{DBLP:conf/emnlp/MinMHZ20}. RAG agents need high-quality data to improve their responses to confusing questions. This paper presents a novel guided hallucination-based method to efficiently generate a diverse set of borderline out-of-scope confusing questions for a given document corpus. We conduct an empirical comparative evaluation of several large language models as RAG agents to measure the accuracy of confusion detection and appropriate response generation. We contribute a benchmark dataset to the public domain.
Authors: Mingzhi Wang, Chengdong Ma, Qizhi Chen, Linjian Meng, Yang Han, Jiancong Xiao, Zhaowei Zhang, Jing Huo, Weijie J. Su, Yaodong Yang
Abstract: Self-play methods have demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing model capabilities across various domains. In the context of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), self-play not only boosts Large Language Model (LLM) performance but also overcomes the limitations of traditional Bradley-Terry (BT) model assumptions by finding the Nash equilibrium (NE) of a preference-based, two-player constant-sum game. However, existing methods either guarantee only average-iterate convergence, incurring high storage and inference costs, or converge to the NE of a regularized game, failing to accurately reflect true human preferences. In this paper, we introduce Magnetic Preference Optimization (MPO), a novel approach capable of achieving last-iterate convergence to the NE of the original game, effectively overcoming the limitations of existing methods. Building upon Magnetic Mirror Descent (MMD), MPO attains a linear convergence rate, making it particularly suitable for fine-tuning LLMs. To ensure our algorithm is both theoretically sound and practically viable, we present a simple yet effective implementation that adapts the theoretical insights to the RLHF setting. Empirical results demonstrate that MPO can significantly enhance the performance of LLMs, highlighting the potential of self-play methods in alignment.
Authors: Yucheng Zhou, Zhi Rao, Jun Wan, Jianbing Shen
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) excel in cross-model tasks but experience performance declines in long-context reasoning due to overreliance on textual information and reduced visual dependency. In this study, we empirically analyze LVLMs in long-context reasoning, revealing that increased context length leads to a higher dependence on language at the expense of visual dependency. To address this issue, we propose a novel training-free context pruning method that selectively removes less critical textual information. Our approach enhances visual dependency and reduces textual noise, thereby improving LVLM performance in long-context reasoning. We validate our method by constructing a long-context dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness across various LVLMs. Moreover, further analysis confirms the robustness of different token pruning strategies and preliminary explores scaling laws between pruning rates and context length.
Authors: Gal Beeri, Benoit Chamot, Elena Latchem, Shruthi Venkatesh, Sarah Whalan, Van Zyl Kruger, David Martino
Abstract: This exploratory pilot study investigated the potential of combining a domain-specific model, BERN2, with large language models (LLMs) to enhance automated disease phenotyping from research survey data. Motivated by the need for efficient and accurate methods to harmonize the growing volume of survey data with standardized disease ontologies, we employed BERN2, a biomedical named entity recognition and normalization model, to extract disease information from the ORIGINS birth cohort survey data. After rigorously evaluating BERN2's performance against a manually curated ground truth dataset, we integrated various LLMs using prompt engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and Instructional Fine-Tuning (IFT) to refine the model's outputs. BERN2 demonstrated high performance in extracting and normalizing disease mentions, and the integration of LLMs, particularly with Few Shot Inference and RAG orchestration, further improved accuracy. This approach, especially when incorporating structured examples, logical reasoning prompts, and detailed context, offers a promising avenue for developing tools to enable efficient cohort profiling and data harmonization across large, heterogeneous research datasets.
Authors: M. Mehdi Mojarradi, Lingyi Yang, Robert McCraith, Adam Mahdi
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across various tasks, but their performance on domain-specific tasks remains limited. While methods like retrieval augmented generation and fine-tuning can help to address this, they require significant resources. In-context learning (ICL) is a cheap and efficient alternative but cannot match the accuracies of advanced methods. We present Ensemble SuperICL, a novel approach that enhances ICL by leveraging the expertise of multiple fine-tuned small language models (SLMs). Ensemble SuperICL achieves state of the art (SoTA) results on several natural language understanding benchmarks. Additionally, we test it on a medical-domain labelling task and showcase its practicality by using off-the-shelf SLMs fine-tuned on a general language task, achieving superior accuracy in large-scale data labelling compared to all baselines. Finally, we conduct an ablation study and sensitivity analyses to elucidate the underlying mechanism of Ensemble SuperICL. Our research contributes to the growing demand for efficient domain specialisation methods in LLMs, offering a cheap and effective method for practitioners.
Authors: Hyukhun Koh, Minha Jhang, Dohyung Kim, Sangmook Lee, Kyomin Jung
Abstract: Recently, discrete diffusion language models have demonstrated promising results in NLP. However, there has been limited research on integrating Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) into discrete diffusion models, resulting in underwhelming performance in downstream NLP generation tasks. This integration is particularly challenging because of the discrepancy between step-wise denoising strategy of diffusion models and single-step mask prediction approach of MLM-based PLMs. In this paper, we introduce Diffusion-EAGS, a novel approach that effectively integrates PLMs with the diffusion models. Furthermore, as it is challenging for PLMs to determine where to apply denoising during the diffusion process, we integrate an entropy tracking module to assist them. Finally, we propose entropy-based noise scheduling in the forward process to improve the effectiveness of entropy-adaptive sampling throughout the generation phase. Experimental results show that Diffusion-EAGS outperforms existing diffusion baselines in downstream generation tasks, achieving high text quality and diversity with precise token-level control. We also show that our model is capable of adapting to bilingual and low-resource settings, which are common in real-world applications.
Authors: Jingxuan Li, Yuning Yang, Shengqi Yang, Linfan Zhang, Ying Nian Wu
Abstract: The recent progress in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has broadened the scope of multimodal applications. However, evaluations often remain limited to functional tasks, neglecting abstract dimensions such as personality traits and human values. To address this gap, we introduce Value-Spectrum, a novel Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark aimed at assessing VLMs based on Schwartz's value dimensions that capture core values guiding people's preferences and actions. We designed a VLM agent pipeline to simulate video browsing and constructed a vector database comprising over 50,000 short videos from TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. These videos span multiple months and cover diverse topics, including family, health, hobbies, society, technology, etc. Benchmarking on Value-Spectrum highlights notable variations in how VLMs handle value-oriented content. Beyond identifying VLMs' intrinsic preferences, we also explored the ability of VLM agents to adopt specific personas when explicitly prompted, revealing insights into the adaptability of the model in role-playing scenarios. These findings highlight the potential of Value-Spectrum as a comprehensive evaluation set for tracking VLM alignments in value-based tasks and abilities to simulate diverse personas.
Authors: John Hughes, Sara Price, Aengus Lynch, Rylan Schaeffer, Fazl Barez, Sanmi Koyejo, Henry Sleight, Erik Jones, Ethan Perez, Mrinank Sharma
Abstract: We introduce Best-of-N (BoN) Jailbreaking, a simple black-box algorithm that jailbreaks frontier AI systems across modalities. BoN Jailbreaking works by repeatedly sampling variations of a prompt with a combination of augmentations - such as random shuffling or capitalization for textual prompts - until a harmful response is elicited. We find that BoN Jailbreaking achieves high attack success rates (ASRs) on closed-source language models, such as 89% on GPT-4o and 78% on Claude 3.5 Sonnet when sampling 10,000 augmented prompts. Further, it is similarly effective at circumventing state-of-the-art open-source defenses like circuit breakers. BoN also seamlessly extends to other modalities: it jailbreaks vision language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4o and audio language models (ALMs) like Gemini 1.5 Pro, using modality-specific augmentations. BoN reliably improves when we sample more augmented prompts. Across all modalities, ASR, as a function of the number of samples (N), empirically follows power-law-like behavior for many orders of magnitude. BoN Jailbreaking can also be composed with other black-box algorithms for even more effective attacks - combining BoN with an optimized prefix attack achieves up to a 35% increase in ASR. Overall, our work indicates that, despite their capability, language models are sensitive to seemingly innocuous changes to inputs, which attackers can exploit across modalities.
Authors: Cristian-George Cr\u{a}ciun, R\u{a}zvan-Alexandru Sm\u{a}du, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, Mihaela-Claudia Cercel
Abstract: Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have shown remarkable performances in recent years, setting a new paradigm for NLP research and industry. The legal domain has received some attention from the NLP community partly due to its textual nature. Some tasks from this domain are represented by question-answering (QA) tasks. This work explores the legal domain Multiple-Choice QA (MCQA) for a low-resource language. The contribution of this work is multi-fold. We first introduce JuRO, the first openly available Romanian legal MCQA dataset, comprising three different examinations and a number of 10,836 total questions. Along with this dataset, we introduce CROL, an organized corpus of laws that has a total of 93 distinct documents with their modifications from 763 time spans, that we leveraged in this work for Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. Moreover, we are the first to propose Law-RoG, a Knowledge Graph (KG) for the Romanian language, and this KG is derived from the aforementioned corpus. Lastly, we propose a novel approach for MCQA, Graph Retrieval Augmented by Facts (GRAF), which achieves competitive results with generally accepted SOTA methods and even exceeds them in most settings.
Authors: Minh Le, Tien Ngoc Luu, An Nguyen The, Thanh-Thien Le, Trang Nguyen, Tung Thanh Nguyen, Linh Ngo Van, Thien Huu Nguyen
Abstract: To address catastrophic forgetting in Continual Relation Extraction (CRE), many current approaches rely on memory buffers to rehearse previously learned knowledge while acquiring new tasks. Recently, prompt-based methods have emerged as potent alternatives to rehearsal-based strategies, demonstrating strong empirical performance. However, upon analyzing existing prompt-based approaches for CRE, we identified several critical limitations, such as inaccurate prompt selection, inadequate mechanisms for mitigating forgetting in shared parameters, and suboptimal handling of cross-task and within-task variances. To overcome these challenges, we draw inspiration from the relationship between prefix-tuning and mixture of experts, proposing a novel approach that employs a prompt pool for each task, capturing variations within each task while enhancing cross-task variances. Furthermore, we incorporate a generative model to consolidate prior knowledge within shared parameters, eliminating the need for explicit data storage. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating superior performance over state-of-the-art prompt-based and rehearsal-free methods in continual relation extraction.
Authors: Alistair Plum, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Christoph Purschke
Abstract: This paper addresses the challenges in developing language models for less-represented languages, with a focus on Luxembourgish. Despite its active development, Luxembourgish faces a digital data scarcity, exacerbated by Luxembourg's multilingual context. We propose a novel text generation model based on the T5 architecture, combining limited Luxembourgish data with equal amounts, in terms of size and type, of German and French data. We hypothesise that a model trained on Luxembourgish, German, and French will improve the model's cross-lingual transfer learning capabilities and outperform monolingual and large multilingual models. To verify this, the study at hand explores whether multilingual or monolingual training is more beneficial for Luxembourgish language generation. For the evaluation, we introduce LuxGen, a text generation benchmark that is the first of its kind for Luxembourgish.
Authors: Vincent-Pierre Berges, Barlas O\u{g}uz, Daniel Haziza, Wen-tau Yih, Luke Zettlemoyer, Gargi Ghosh
Abstract: Memory layers use a trainable key-value lookup mechanism to add extra parameters to a model without increasing FLOPs. Conceptually, sparsely activated memory layers complement compute-heavy dense feed-forward layers, providing dedicated capacity to store and retrieve information cheaply. This work takes memory layers beyond proof-of-concept, proving their utility at contemporary scale. On downstream tasks, language models augmented with our improved memory layer outperform dense models with more than twice the computation budget, as well as mixture-of-expert models when matched for both compute and parameters. We find gains are especially pronounced for factual tasks. We provide a fully parallelizable memory layer implementation, demonstrating scaling laws with up to 128B memory parameters, pretrained to 1 trillion tokens, comparing to base models with up to 8B parameters.
Authors: Rajib Rana, Niall Higgins, Kazi N. Haque, John Reilly, Kylie Burke, Kathryn Turner, Anthony R. Pisani, Terry Stedman
Abstract: Background: Formulation, associated with suicide risk assessment, is an individualised process that seeks to understand the idiosyncratic nature and development of an individual's problems. Auditing clinical documentation on an electronic health record (EHR) is challenging as it requires resource-intensive manual efforts to identify keywords in relevant sections of specific forms. Furthermore, clinicians and healthcare professionals often do not use keywords; their clinical language can vary greatly and may contain various jargon and acronyms. Also, the relevant information may be recorded elsewhere. This study describes how we developed advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms, a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to analyse EHR data automatically. Method: Advanced Optical Character Recognition techniques were used to process unstructured data sets, such as portable document format (pdf) files. Free text data was cleaned and pre-processed using Normalisation of Free Text techniques. We developed algorithms and tools to unify the free text. Finally, the formulation was checked for the presence of each concept based on similarity using NLP-powered semantic matching techniques. Results: We extracted information indicative of formulation and assessed it to cover the relevant concepts. This was achieved using a Weighted Score to obtain a Confidence Level. Conclusion: The rigour to which formulation is completed is crucial to effectively using EHRs, ensuring correct and timely identification, engagement and interventions that may potentially avoid many suicide attempts and suicides.
Authors: Muhammad Huzaifah, Geyu Lin, Tianchi Liu, Hardik B. Sailor, Kye Min Tan, Tarun K. Vangani, Qiongqiong Wang, Jeremy H. M. Wong, Nancy F. Chen, Ai Ti Aw
Abstract: This technical report describes the MERaLiON-SpeechEncoder, a foundation model designed to support a wide range of downstream speech applications. Developed as part of Singapore's National Multimodal Large Language Model Programme, the MERaLiON-SpeechEncoder is tailored to address the speech processing needs in Singapore and the surrounding Southeast Asian region. The model currently supports mainly English, including the variety spoken in Singapore. We are actively expanding our datasets to gradually cover other languages in subsequent releases. The MERaLiON-SpeechEncoder was pre-trained from scratch on 200,000 hours of unlabelled speech data using a self-supervised learning approach based on masked language modelling. We describe our training procedure and hyperparameter tuning experiments in detail below. Our evaluation demonstrates improvements to spontaneous and Singapore speech benchmarks for speech recognition, while remaining competitive to other state-of-the-art speech encoders across ten other speech tasks. We commit to releasing our model, supporting broader research endeavours, both in Singapore and beyond.
Authors: Ziqi Qiu, Jianxing Yu, Yufeng Zhang, Hanjiang Lai, Yanghui Rao, Qinliang Su, Jian Yin
Abstract: This paper focuses on sarcasm detection, which aims to identify whether given statements convey criticism, mockery, or other negative sentiment opposite to the literal meaning. To detect sarcasm, humans often require a comprehensive understanding of the semantics in the statement and even resort to external commonsense to infer the fine-grained incongruity. However, existing methods lack commonsense inferential ability when they face complex real-world scenarios, leading to unsatisfactory performance. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework for sarcasm detection, which conducts incongruity reasoning based on commonsense augmentation, called EICR. Concretely, we first employ retrieval-augmented large language models to supplement the missing but indispensable commonsense background knowledge. To capture complex contextual associations, we construct a dependency graph and obtain the optimized topology via graph refinement. We further introduce an adaptive reasoning skeleton that integrates prior rules to extract sentiment-inconsistent subgraphs explicitly. To eliminate the possible spurious relations between words and labels, we employ adversarial contrastive learning to enhance the robustness of the detector. Experiments conducted on five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of EICR.
Authors: Miles Q. Li, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Shih-Chia Huang
Abstract: Pretraining large language models is a complex endeavor influenced by multiple factors, including model architecture, data quality, training continuity, and hardware constraints. In this paper, we share insights gained from the experience of training DMaS-LLaMa-Lite, a fully open source, 1.7-billion-parameter, LLaMa-based model, on approximately 20 billion tokens of carefully curated data. We chronicle the full training trajectory, documenting how evolving validation loss levels and downstream benchmarks reflect transitions from incoherent text to fluent, contextually grounded output. Beyond pretraining, we extend our analysis to include a post-training phase focused on instruction tuning, where the model was refined to produce more contextually appropriate, user-aligned responses. We highlight practical considerations such as the importance of restoring optimizer states when resuming from checkpoints, and the impact of hardware changes on training stability and throughput. While qualitative evaluation provides an intuitive understanding of model improvements, our analysis extends to various performance benchmarks, demonstrating how high-quality data and thoughtful scaling enable competitive results with significantly fewer training tokens. By detailing these experiences and offering training logs, checkpoints, and sample outputs, we aim to guide future researchers and practitioners in refining their pretraining strategies. The training script is available on Github at https://github.com/McGill-DMaS/DMaS-LLaMa-Lite-Training-Code. The model checkpoints are available on Huggingface at https://huggingface.co/collections/McGill-DMaS/dmas-llama-lite-6761d97ba903f82341954ceb.
URLs: https://github.com/McGill-DMaS/DMaS-LLaMa-Lite-Training-Code., https://huggingface.co/collections/McGill-DMaS/dmas-llama-lite-6761d97ba903f82341954ceb.
Authors: Vera Neplenbroek, Arianna Bisazza, Raquel Fern\'andez
Abstract: Recent generative large language models (LLMs) show remarkable performance in non-English languages, but when prompted in those languages they tend to express higher harmful social biases and toxicity levels. Prior work has shown that finetuning on specialized datasets can mitigate this behavior, and doing so in English can transfer to other languages. In this work, we investigate the impact of different finetuning methods on the model's bias and toxicity, but also on its ability to produce fluent and diverse text. Our results show that finetuning on curated non-harmful text is more effective for mitigating bias, and finetuning on direct preference optimization (DPO) datasets is more effective for mitigating toxicity. The mitigation caused by applying these methods in English also transfers to non-English languages. We find evidence that the extent to which transfer takes place can be predicted by the amount of data in a given language present in the model's pretraining data. However, this transfer of bias and toxicity mitigation often comes at the expense of decreased language generation ability in non-English languages, highlighting the importance of developing language-specific bias and toxicity mitigation methods.
Authors: Shaina Raza, Drai Paulen-Patterson, Chen Ding
Abstract: Fake news poses a significant threat to public opinion and social stability in modern society. This study presents a comparative evaluation of BERT-like encoder-only models and autoregressive decoder-only large language models (LLMs) for fake news detection. We introduce a dataset of news articles labeled with GPT-4 assistance (an AI-labeling method) and verified by human experts to ensure reliability. Both BERT-like encoder-only models and LLMs were fine-tuned on this dataset. Additionally, we developed an instruction-tuned LLM approach with majority voting during inference for label generation. Our analysis reveals that BERT-like models generally outperform LLMs in classification tasks, while LLMs demonstrate superior robustness against text perturbations. Compared to weak labels (distant supervision) data, the results show that AI labels with human supervision achieve better classification results. This study highlights the effectiveness of combining AI-based annotation with human oversight and demonstrates the performance of different families of machine learning models for fake news detection
Authors: Adam Meyers, Advait Pravin Savant, John E. Ortega
Abstract: This article is about Semantic Role Labeling for English partitive nouns (5%/REL of the price/ARG1; The price/ARG1 rose 5 percent/REL) in the NomBank annotated corpus. Several systems are described using traditional and transformer-based machine learning, as well as ensembling. Our highest scoring system achieves an F1 of 91.74% using "gold" parses from the Penn Treebank and 91.12% when using the Berkeley Neural parser. This research includes both classroom and experimental settings for system development.
Authors: Lei Lu, Zhepeng Wang, Runxue Bao, Mengbing Wang, Fangyi Li, Yawen Wu, Weiwen Jiang, Jie Xu, Yanzhi Wang, Shangqian Gao
Abstract: Existing pruning techniques for large language models (LLMs) targeting domain-specific applications typically follow a two-stage process: pruning the pretrained general-purpose LLMs and then fine-tuning the pruned LLMs on specific domains. However, the pruning decisions, derived from the pretrained weights, remain unchanged during fine-tuning, even if the weights have been updated. Therefore, such a combination of the pruning decisions and the finetuned weights may be suboptimal, leading to non-negligible performance degradation. To address these limitations, we propose ATP: All-in-One Tuning and Structural Pruning, a unified one-stage structural pruning and fine-tuning approach that dynamically identifies the current optimal substructure throughout the fine-tuning phase via a trainable pruning decision generator. Moreover, given the limited available data for domain-specific applications, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) becomes a common technique to fine-tune the LLMs. In ATP, we introduce LoRA-aware forward and sparsity regularization to ensure that the substructures corresponding to the learned pruning decisions can be directly removed after the ATP process. ATP outperforms the state-of-the-art two-stage pruning methods on tasks in the legal and healthcare domains. More specifically, ATP recovers up to 88% and 91% performance of the dense model when pruning 40% parameters of LLaMA2-7B and LLaMA3-8B models, respectively.
Authors: Zeao Tu, Xiangdi Meng, Yu He, Zihan Yao, Tianyu Qi, Jun Liu, Ming Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable effectiveness across various domains, with data augmentation methods utilizing GPT for synthetic data generation becoming prevalent. However, the quality and utility of augmented data remain questionable, and current methods lack clear metrics for evaluating data characteristics. To address these challenges, we propose ResoFilter, a novel method that integrates models, data, and tasks to refine datasets. ResoFilter leverages the fine-tuning process to obtain Data-Parameter features for data selection, offering improved interpretability by representing data characteristics through model weights. Our experiments demonstrate that ResoFilter achieves comparable results to full-scale fine-tuning using only half the data in mathematical tasks and exhibits strong generalization across different models and domains. This method provides valuable insights for constructing synthetic datasets and evaluating high-quality data, offering a promising solution for enhancing data augmentation techniques and improving training dataset quality for LLMs. For reproducibility, we will release our code and data upon acceptance.
Authors: Pietro Bernardelle, Leon Fr\"ohling, Stefano Civelli, Riccardo Lunardi, Kevin Roitero, Gianluca Demartini
Abstract: The analysis of political biases in large language models (LLMs) has primarily examined these systems as single entities with fixed viewpoints. While various methods exist for measuring such biases, the impact of persona-based prompting on LLMs' political orientation remains unexplored. In this work we leverage PersonaHub, a collection of synthetic persona descriptions, to map the political distribution of persona-based prompted LLMs using the Political Compass Test (PCT). We then examine whether these initial compass distributions can be manipulated through explicit ideological prompting towards diametrically opposed political orientations: right-authoritarian and left-libertarian. Our experiments reveal that synthetic personas predominantly cluster in the left-libertarian quadrant, with models demonstrating varying degrees of responsiveness when prompted with explicit ideological descriptors. While all models demonstrate significant shifts towards right-authoritarian positions, they exhibit more limited shifts towards left-libertarian positions, suggesting an asymmetric response to ideological manipulation that may reflect inherent biases in model training.
Authors: Yao Liang, Hongjian Fang, Yi Zeng, Feifei Zhao
Abstract: Reasoning and question answering as a basic cognitive function for humans, is nevertheless a great challenge for current artificial intelligence. Although the Differentiable Neural Computer (DNC) model could solve such problems to a certain extent, the development is still limited by its high algorithm complexity, slow convergence speed, and poor test robustness. Inspired by the learning and memory mechanism of the brain, this paper proposed a Memory Transformation based Differentiable Neural Computer (MT-DNC) model. MT-DNC incorporates working memory and long-term memory into DNC, and realizes the autonomous transformation of acquired experience between working memory and long-term memory, thereby helping to effectively extract acquired knowledge to improve reasoning ability. Experimental results on bAbI question answering task demonstrated that our proposed method achieves superior performance and faster convergence speed compared to other existing DNN and DNC models. Ablation studies also indicated that the memory transformation from working memory to long-term memory plays essential role in improving the robustness and stability of reasoning. This work explores how brain-inspired memory transformation can be integrated and applied to complex intelligent dialogue and reasoning systems.
Authors: Andrew Zhao, Daniel Huang, Quentin Xu, Matthieu Lin, Yong-Jin Liu, Gao Huang
Abstract: The recent surge in research interest in applying large language models (LLMs) to decision-making tasks has flourished by leveraging the extensive world knowledge embedded in LLMs. While there is a growing demand to tailor LLMs for custom decision-making tasks, finetuning them for specific tasks is resource-intensive and may diminish the model's generalization capabilities. Moreover, state-of-the-art language models like GPT-4 and Claude are primarily accessible through API calls, with their parametric weights remaining proprietary and unavailable to the public. This scenario emphasizes the growing need for new methodologies that allow learning from agent experiences without requiring parametric updates. To address these problems, we introduce the Experiential Learning (ExpeL) agent. Our agent autonomously gathers experiences and extracts knowledge using natural language from a collection of training tasks. At inference, the agent recalls its extracted insights and past experiences to make informed decisions. Our empirical results highlight the robust learning efficacy of the ExpeL agent, indicating a consistent enhancement in its performance as it accumulates experiences. We further explore the emerging capabilities and transfer learning potential of the ExpeL agent through qualitative observations and additional experiments.
Authors: Zhaocheng Zhu, Yuan Xue, Xinyun Chen, Denny Zhou, Jian Tang, Dale Schuurmans, Hanjun Dai
Abstract: When prompted with a few examples and intermediate steps, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various reasoning tasks. However, prompting methods that rely on implicit knowledge in an LLM often generate incorrect answers when the implicit knowledge is wrong or inconsistent with the task. To tackle this problem, we present Hypotheses-to-Theories (HtT), a framework that learns a rule library for reasoning with LLMs. HtT contains two stages, an induction stage and a deduction stage. In the induction stage, an LLM is first asked to generate and verify rules over a set of training examples. Rules that appear and lead to correct answers sufficiently often are collected to form a rule library. In the deduction stage, the LLM is then prompted to employ the learned rule library to perform reasoning to answer test questions. Experiments on relational reasoning, numerical reasoning and concept learning problems show that HtT improves existing prompting methods, with an absolute gain of 10-30% in accuracy. The learned rules are also transferable to different models and to different forms of the same problem.
Authors: Smriti Singh, Shuvam Keshari, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha
Abstract: Socioeconomic bias in society exacerbates disparities, influencing access to opportunities and resources based on individuals' economic and social backgrounds. This pervasive issue perpetuates systemic inequalities, hindering the pursuit of inclusive progress as a society. In this paper, we investigate the presence of socioeconomic bias, if any, in large language models. To this end, we introduce a novel dataset SilverSpoon, consisting of 3000 samples that illustrate hypothetical scenarios that involve underprivileged people performing ethically ambiguous actions due to their circumstances, and ask whether the action is ethically justified. Further, this dataset has a dual-labeling scheme and has been annotated by people belonging to both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. Using SilverSpoon, we evaluate the degree of socioeconomic bias expressed in large language models and the variation of this degree as a function of model size. We also perform qualitative analysis to analyze the nature of this bias. Our analysis reveals that while humans disagree on which situations require empathy toward the underprivileged, most large language models are unable to empathize with the socioeconomically underprivileged regardless of the situation. To foster further research in this domain, we make SilverSpoon and our evaluation harness publicly available.
Authors: Hector Zenil, Felipe S. Abrah\~ao, Luan C. S. M. Ozelim
Abstract: Based on the principles of information theory, measure theory, and theoretical computer science, we introduce a signal deconvolution method with a wide range of applications to coding theory, particularly in zero-knowledge one-way communication channels, such as in deciphering messages (i.e., objects embedded into multidimensional spaces) from unknown generating sources about which no prior knowledge is available and to which no return message can be sent. Our multidimensional space reconstruction method from an arbitrary received signal is proven to be agnostic vis-\`a-vis the encoding-decoding scheme, computation model, programming language, formal theory, the computable (or semi-computable) method of approximation to algorithmic complexity, and any arbitrarily chosen (computable) probability measure. The method derives from the principles of an approach to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capable of building a general-purpose model of models independent of any arbitrarily assumed prior probability distribution. We argue that this optimal and universal method of decoding non-random data has applications to signal processing, causal deconvolution, topological and geometric properties encoding, cryptography, and bio- and technosignature detection.
Authors: James Requeima, John Bronskill, Dami Choi, Richard E. Turner, David Duvenaud
Abstract: Machine learning practitioners often face significant challenges in formally integrating their prior knowledge and beliefs into predictive models, limiting the potential for nuanced and context-aware analyses. Moreover, the expertise needed to integrate this prior knowledge into probabilistic modeling typically limits the application of these models to specialists. Our goal is to build a regression model that can process numerical data and make probabilistic predictions at arbitrary locations, guided by natural language text which describes a user's prior knowledge. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a useful starting point for designing such a tool since they 1) provide an interface where users can incorporate expert insights in natural language and 2) provide an opportunity for leveraging latent problem-relevant knowledge encoded in LLMs that users may not have themselves. We start by exploring strategies for eliciting explicit, coherent numerical predictive distributions from LLMs. We examine these joint predictive distributions, which we call LLM Processes, over arbitrarily-many quantities in settings such as forecasting, multi-dimensional regression, black-box optimization, and image modeling. We investigate the practical details of prompting to elicit coherent predictive distributions, and demonstrate their effectiveness at regression. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to usefully incorporate text into numerical predictions, improving predictive performance and giving quantitative structure that reflects qualitative descriptions. This lets us begin to explore the rich, grounded hypothesis space that LLMs implicitly encode.
Authors: Jiapu Wang, Kai Sun, Linhao Luo, Wei Wei, Yongli Hu, Alan Wee-Chung Liew, Shirui Pan, Baocai Yin
Abstract: Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (TKGR) is the process of utilizing temporal information to capture complex relations within a Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) to infer new knowledge. Conventional methods in TKGR typically depend on deep learning algorithms or temporal logical rules. However, deep learning-based TKGRs often lack interpretability, whereas rule-based TKGRs struggle to effectively learn temporal rules that capture temporal patterns. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extensive knowledge and remarkable proficiency in temporal reasoning. Consequently, the employment of LLMs for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (TKGR) has sparked increasing interest among researchers. Nonetheless, LLMs are known to function as black boxes, making it challenging to comprehend their reasoning process. Additionally, due to the resource-intensive nature of fine-tuning, promptly updating LLMs to integrate evolving knowledge within TKGs for reasoning is impractical. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a Large Language Models-guided Dynamic Adaptation (LLM-DA) method for reasoning on TKGs. Specifically, LLM-DA harnesses the capabilities of LLMs to analyze historical data and extract temporal logical rules. These rules unveil temporal patterns and facilitate interpretable reasoning. To account for the evolving nature of TKGs, a dynamic adaptation strategy is proposed to update the LLM-generated rules with the latest events. This ensures that the extracted rules always incorporate the most recent knowledge and better generalize to the predictions on future events. Experimental results show that without the need of fine-tuning, LLM-DA significantly improves the accuracy of reasoning over several common datasets, providing a robust framework for TKGR tasks.
Authors: Andrew Zhao, Quentin Xu, Matthieu Lin, Shenzhi Wang, Yong-jin Liu, Zilong Zheng, Gao Huang
Abstract: Recent advances in large language model assistants have made them indispensable, raising significant concerns over managing their safety. Automated red teaming offers a promising alternative to the labor-intensive and error-prone manual probing for vulnerabilities, providing more consistent and scalable safety evaluations. However, existing approaches often compromise diversity by focusing on maximizing attack success rate. Additionally, methods that decrease the cosine similarity from historical embeddings with semantic diversity rewards lead to novelty stagnation as history grows. To address these issues, we introduce DiveR-CT, which relaxes conventional constraints on the objective and semantic reward, granting greater freedom for the policy to enhance diversity. Our experiments demonstrate DiveR-CT's marked superiority over baselines by 1) generating data that perform better in various diversity metrics across different attack success rate levels, 2) better-enhancing resiliency in blue team models through safety tuning based on collected data, 3) allowing dynamic control of objective weights for reliable and controllable attack success rates, and 4) reducing susceptibility to reward overoptimization. Overall, our method provides an effective and efficient approach to LLM red teaming, accelerating real-world deployment.
Authors: Brandon Huang, Chancharik Mitra, Assaf Arbelle, Leonid Karlinsky, Trevor Darrell, Roei Herzig
Abstract: The recent success of interleaved Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in few-shot learning suggests that in-context learning (ICL) with many examples can be promising for learning new tasks. However, this many-shot multimodal ICL setting has one crucial problem: it is fundamentally limited by the model's context length set at pretraining. The problem is especially prominent in the multimodal domain, which processes both text and images, requiring additional tokens. This motivates the need for a multimodal method to compress many shots into fewer tokens without finetuning. In this work, we enable LMMs to perform multimodal, many-shot in-context learning by leveraging Multimodal Task Vectors (MTV) -- compact implicit representations of in-context examples compressed in the model's attention heads. Specifically, we first demonstrate the existence of such MTV in LMMs and then leverage these extracted MTV to enable many-shot in-context learning for various vision-and-language tasks. Our experiments suggest that MTV can scale in performance with the number of compressed shots and generalize to similar out-of-domain tasks without additional context length for inference. Code: https://github.com/Brandon3964/MultiModal-Task-Vector
Authors: Jean Park, Kuk Jin Jang, Basam Alasaly, Sriharsha Mopidevi, Andrew Zolensky, Eric Eaton, Insup Lee, Kevin Johnson
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can simultaneously process visual, textual, and auditory data, capturing insights that complement human analysis. However, existing video question-answering (VidQA) benchmarks and datasets often exhibit a bias toward a single modality, despite the goal of requiring advanced reasoning skills that integrate diverse modalities to answer the queries. In this work, we introduce the modality importance score (MIS) to identify such bias. It is designed to assess which modality embeds the necessary information to answer the question. Additionally, we propose an innovative method using state-of-the-art MLLMs to estimate the modality importance, which can serve as a proxy for human judgments of modality perception. With this MIS, we demonstrate the presence of unimodal bias and the scarcity of genuinely multimodal questions in existing datasets. We further validate the modality importance score with multiple ablation studies to evaluate the performance of MLLMs on permuted feature sets. Our results indicate that current models do not effectively integrate information due to modality imbalance in existing datasets. Our proposed MLLM-derived MIS can guide the curation of modality-balanced datasets that advance multimodal learning and enhance MLLMs' capabilities to understand and utilize synergistic relations across modalities.
Authors: Shen Nie, Fengqi Zhu, Chao Du, Tianyu Pang, Qian Liu, Guangtao Zeng, Min Lin, Chongxuan Li
Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have shown promise in language modeling, yet their scalability and effectiveness in core language tasks, such as text generation and language understanding, remain underexplored. This paper establishes the first scaling law for MDMs, demonstrating a scaling rate comparable to autoregressive models (ARMs) and a relatively small compute gap. Motivated by their scalability, we train a family of MDMs with up to 1.1 billion (B) parameters to systematically evaluate their performance against ARMs of comparable or larger sizes. Fully leveraging the probabilistic formulation of MDMs, we propose a simple yet effective unsupervised classifier-free guidance that effectively exploits large-scale unpaired data, boosting performance for conditional inference. In language understanding, the 1.1B MDM outperforms the 1.1B TinyLlama model trained on the same data across four of eight zero-shot benchmarks. Notably, it achieves competitive math reasoning ability with the 7B Llama-2 model on the GSM8K dataset. In text generation, MDMs provide a flexible trade-off compared to ARMs utilizing KV-cache: MDMs match the performance of ARMs while being 1.4 times faster or achieving higher quality than ARMs at a higher computational cost. Moreover, MDMs address challenging tasks for ARMs by effectively handling bidirectional reasoning and adapting to temporal shifts in data. Notably, a 1.1B MDM breaks the reverse curse encountered by much larger ARMs with significantly more data and computation, such as 13B Llama-2 and 175B GPT-3. Our code is available at https://github.com/ML-GSAI/SMDM.
Authors: Marharyta Domnich, Julius Valja, Rasmus Moorits Veski, Giacomo Magnifico, Kadi Tulver, Eduard Barbu, Raul Vicente
Abstract: As machine learning models evolve, maintaining transparency demands more human-centric explainable AI techniques. Counterfactual explanations, with roots in human reasoning, identify the minimal input changes needed to obtain a given output and, hence, are crucial for supporting decision-making. Despite their importance, the evaluation of these explanations often lacks grounding in user studies and remains fragmented, with existing metrics not fully capturing human perspectives. To address this challenge, we developed a diverse set of 30 counterfactual scenarios and collected ratings across 8 evaluation metrics from 206 respondents. Subsequently, we fine-tuned different Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict average or individual human judgment across these metrics. Our methodology allowed LLMs to achieve an accuracy of up to 63% in zero-shot evaluations and 85% (over a 3-classes prediction) with fine-tuning across all metrics. The fine-tuned models predicting human ratings offer better comparability and scalability in evaluating different counterfactual explanation frameworks.
Authors: Yuhan Liu, Yuyang Huang, Jiayi Yao, Zhuohan Gu, Kuntai Du, Hanchen Li, Yihua Cheng, Junchen Jiang, Shan Lu, Madan Musuvathi, Esha Choukse
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in complex workflows, where different LLMs and fine-tuned variants collaboratively address complex tasks. However, these systems face significant inefficiencies due to redundant context processing of the shared context. We propose DroidSpeak, a framework that optimizes context sharing between fine-tuned LLMs derived from the same foundational model. DroidSpeak identifies critical layers in the KV cache and selectively recomputes them, enabling effective reuse of intermediate data while maintaining high accuracy. Our approach balances computational efficiency and task fidelity, significantly reducing inference latency and throughput bottlenecks. Experiments on diverse datasets and model pairs demonstrate that DroidSpeak achieves up to 3x higher throughputs and 2.6x faster prefill times with negligible accuracy loss compared to full recomputation.
Authors: Anthony Nguyen
Abstract: Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding plays a crucial role in enhancing the capabilities of Vision-Language Model (VLM) agents. While general VLMs, such as GPT-4V, demonstrate strong performance across various tasks, their proficiency in GUI grounding remains suboptimal. Recent studies have focused on fine-tuning these models specifically for zero-shot GUI grounding, yielding significant improvements over baseline performance. We introduce a visual prompting framework that employs an iterative narrowing mechanism to further improve the performance of both general and fine-tuned models in GUI grounding. For evaluation, we tested our method on a comprehensive benchmark comprising various UI platforms and provided the code to reproduce our results.
Authors: Core Francisco Park, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Itamar Pres, Hidenori Tanaka
Abstract: In-Context Learning (ICL) has significantly expanded the general-purpose nature of large language models, allowing them to adapt to novel tasks using merely the inputted context. This has motivated a series of papers that analyze tractable synthetic domains and postulate precise mechanisms that may underlie ICL. However, the use of relatively distinct setups that often lack a sequence modeling nature to them makes it unclear how general the reported insights from such studies are. Motivated by this, we propose a synthetic sequence modeling task that involves learning to simulate a finite mixture of Markov chains. As we show, models trained on this task reproduce most well-known results on ICL, hence offering a unified setting for studying the concept. Building on this setup, we demonstrate we can explain a model's behavior by decomposing it into four broad algorithms that combine a fuzzy retrieval vs. inference approach with either unigram or bigram statistics of the context. These algorithms engage in a competition dynamics to dominate model behavior, with the precise experimental conditions dictating which algorithm ends up superseding others: e.g., we find merely varying context size or amount of training yields (at times sharp) transitions between which algorithm dictates the model behavior, revealing a mechanism that explains the transient nature of ICL. In this sense, we argue ICL is best thought of as a mixture of different algorithms, each with its own peculiarities, instead of a monolithic capability. This also implies that making general claims about ICL that hold universally across all settings may be infeasible.
Authors: Saaduddin Mahmud, Mason Nakamura, Shlomo Zilberstein
Abstract: The advent of large language models (LLMs) has sparked significant interest in using natural language for preference learning. However, existing methods often suffer from high computational burdens, taxing human supervision, and lack of interpretability. To address these issues, we introduce MAPLE, a framework for large language model-guided Bayesian active preference learning. MAPLE leverages LLMs to model the distribution over preference functions, conditioning it on both natural language feedback and conventional preference learning feedback, such as pairwise trajectory rankings. MAPLE also employs active learning to systematically reduce uncertainty in this distribution and incorporates a language-conditioned active query selection mechanism to identify informative and easy-to-answer queries, thus reducing human burden. We evaluate MAPLE's sample efficiency and preference inference quality across two benchmarks, including a real-world vehicle route planning benchmark using OpenStreetMap data. Our results demonstrate that MAPLE accelerates the learning process and effectively improves humans' ability to answer queries.
Authors: Xiaqiang Tang, Jian Li, Nan Du, Sihong Xie
Abstract: Despite the superior performance of Large language models on many NLP tasks, they still face significant limitations in memorizing extensive world knowledge. Recent studies have demonstrated that leveraging the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, combined with Knowledge Graphs that encapsulate extensive factual data in a structured format, robustly enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. However, deploying such systems in real-world scenarios presents challenges: the continuous evolution of non-stationary environments may lead to performance degradation and user satisfaction requires a careful balance of performance and responsiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce a Multi-objective Multi-Armed Bandit enhanced RAG framework, supported by multiple retrieval methods with diverse capabilities under rich and evolving retrieval contexts in practice. Within this framework, each retrieval method is treated as a distinct ``arm''. The system utilizes real-time user feedback to adapt to dynamic environments, by selecting the appropriate retrieval method based on input queries and the historical multi-objective performance of each arm. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmark KGQA datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms baseline methods in non-stationary settings while achieving state-of-the-art performance in stationary environments. Code and data are available at https://github.com/FUTUREEEEEE/Dynamic-RAG.git
Authors: Jingze Shi, Bingheng Wu
Abstract: In order to make the foundation model more efficient and effective, our idea is combining sequence transformation and state transformation. First, we prove the availability of rotary position embedding in the state space duality algorithm, which reduces the perplexity of the hybrid quadratic causal self-attention and state space duality by more than 4%, to ensure that the combining sequence transformation unifies position encoding. Second, we propose dynamic mask attention, which maintains 100% accuracy in the more challenging multi-query associative recall task, improving by more than 150% compared to quadratic causal self-attention and state space duality, to ensure that the combining sequence transformation selectively filters relevant information. Third, we design cross domain mixture of experts, which makes the computational speed of expert retrieval with more than 1024 experts 8 to 10 times faster than the mixture of experts, to ensure that the combining state transformation quickly retrieval mixture. Finally, we summarize these matrix algorithms that can form the foundation model: Wonderful Matrices, which can be a competitor to popular model architectures.
Authors: Jaeseok Yoo, Hojae Han, Youngwon Lee, Jaejin Kim, Seung-won Hwang
Abstract: Code generation with large language models has shown significant promise, especially when employing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with few-shot examples. However, selecting effective examples that enhance generation quality remains a challenging task, particularly when the target programming language (PL) is underrepresented. In this study, we present two key findings: (1) retrieving examples whose presented algorithmic plans can be referenced for generating the desired behavior significantly improves generation accuracy, and (2) converting code into pseudocode effectively captures such algorithmic plans, enhancing retrieval quality even when the source and the target PLs are different. Based on these findings, we propose Plan-as-query Example Retrieval for few-shot prompting in Code generation (PERC), a novel framework that utilizes algorithmic plans to identify and retrieve effective examples. We validate the effectiveness of PERC through extensive experiments on the CodeContests, HumanEval and MultiPL-E benchmarks: PERC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art RAG methods in code generation, both when the source and target programming languages match or differ, highlighting its adaptability and robustness in diverse coding environments.
Authors: Jianlyu Chen, Nan Wang, Chaofan Li, Bo Wang, Shitao Xiao, Han Xiao, Hao Liao, Defu Lian, Zheng Liu
Abstract: Evaluation plays a crucial role in the advancement of information retrieval (IR) models. However, current benchmarks, which are based on predefined domains and human-labeled data, face limitations in addressing evaluation needs for emerging domains both cost-effectively and efficiently. To address this challenge, we propose the Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark (AIR-Bench). AIR-Bench is distinguished by three key features: 1) Automated. The testing data in AIR-Bench is automatically generated by large language models (LLMs) without human intervention. 2) Heterogeneous. The testing data in AIR-Bench is generated with respect to diverse tasks, domains and languages. 3) Dynamic. The domains and languages covered by AIR-Bench are constantly augmented to provide an increasingly comprehensive evaluation benchmark for community developers. We develop a reliable and robust data generation pipeline to automatically create diverse and high-quality evaluation datasets based on real-world corpora. Our findings demonstrate that the generated testing data in AIR-Bench aligns well with human-labeled testing data, making AIR-Bench a dependable benchmark for evaluating IR models. The resources in AIR-Bench are publicly available at https://github.com/AIR-Bench/AIR-Bench.
Authors: Jie-Jing Shao, Xiao-Wen Yang, Bo-Wen Zhang, Baizhi Chen, Wen-Da Wei, Guohao Cai, Zhenhua Dong, Lan-Zhe Guo, Yu-feng Li
Abstract: Recent advances in LLMs, particularly in language reasoning and tool integration, have rapidly sparked the real-world development of Language Agents. Among these, travel planning represents a prominent domain, combining academic challenges with practical value due to its complexity and market demand. However, existing benchmarks fail to reflect the diverse, real-world requirements crucial for deployment. To address this gap, we introduce ChinaTravel, a benchmark specifically designed for authentic Chinese travel planning scenarios. We collect the travel requirements from questionnaires and propose a compositionally generalizable domain-specific language that enables a scalable evaluation process, covering feasibility, constraint satisfaction, and preference comparison. Empirical studies reveal the potential of neuro-symbolic agents in travel planning, achieving a constraint satisfaction rate of 27.9%, significantly surpassing purely neural models at 2.6%. Moreover, we identify key challenges in real-world travel planning deployments, including open language reasoning and unseen concept composition. These findings highlight the significance of ChinaTravel as a pivotal milestone for advancing language agents in complex, real-world planning scenarios.
Authors: Ryan Greenblatt, Carson Denison, Benjamin Wright, Fabien Roger, Monte MacDiarmid, Sam Marks, Johannes Treutlein, Tim Belonax, Jack Chen, David Duvenaud, Akbir Khan, Julian Michael, S\"oren Mindermann, Ethan Perez, Linda Petrini, Jonathan Uesato, Jared Kaplan, Buck Shlegeris, Samuel R. Bowman, Evan Hubinger
Abstract: We present a demonstration of a large language model engaging in alignment faking: selectively complying with its training objective in training to prevent modification of its behavior out of training. First, we give Claude 3 Opus a system prompt stating it is being trained to answer all queries, even harmful ones, which conflicts with its prior training to refuse such queries. To allow the model to infer when it is in training, we say it will be trained only on conversations with free users, not paid users. We find the model complies with harmful queries from free users 14% of the time, versus almost never for paid users. Explaining this gap, in almost all cases where the model complies with a harmful query from a free user, we observe explicit alignment-faking reasoning, with the model stating it is strategically answering harmful queries in training to preserve its preferred harmlessness behavior out of training. Next, we study a more realistic setting where information about the training process is provided not in a system prompt, but by training on synthetic documents that mimic pre-training data--and observe similar alignment faking. Finally, we study the effect of actually training the model to comply with harmful queries via reinforcement learning, which we find increases the rate of alignment-faking reasoning to 78%, though also increases compliance even out of training. We additionally observe other behaviors such as the model exfiltrating its weights when given an easy opportunity. While we made alignment faking easier by telling the model when and by what criteria it was being trained, we did not instruct the model to fake alignment or give it any explicit goal. As future models might infer information about their training process without being told, our results suggest a risk of alignment faking in future models, whether due to a benign preference--as in this case--or not.