arXiv subjects

Lifeng Shang

Publications and source records attributed to Lifeng Shang.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Crowd Comparative Reasoning: Unlocking Comprehensive Evaluations for LLM-as-a-Judge

LLM-as-a-Judge, which generates chain-of-thought (CoT) judgments, has become a widely adopted auto-evaluation method. However, its reliability is compromised by the CoT reasoning's inability to capture comprehensive and deeper details, often leading to incomplete outcomes. Existing methods mainly rely on majority voting or criteria expansion, which is insufficient to address the limitation in CoT. We propose Crowd-based Comparative Evaluation, which introduces additional crowd responses to compare with the candidate responses, thereby exposing deeper and more comprehensive details within the candidate responses. This process effectively guides LLM-as-a-Judge to provide a more detailed CoT judgment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enhances evaluation reliability, achieving an average accuracy gain of 6.7% across five benchmarks. Moreover, our method produces higher-quality CoTs that facilitate judge distillation and exhibit superior performance in rejection sampling for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), referred to as crowd rejection sampling, thereby enabling more efficient SFT. Our analysis confirms that CoTs generated by ours are more comprehensive and of higher quality, and evaluation accuracy improves as inference scales.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Chain-of-Probe: Examining the Necessity and Accuracy of CoT Step-by-Step

Current research found the issue of Early Answering in large language models (LLMs), where the models already have an answer before generating the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). This phenomenon suggests a potential lack of necessary dependency between the predicted answer and the reasoning process. Consequently, two important questions arise: (1) Is CoT still necessary if the model already has an answer? (2) Can the correctness of the answer serve as valid evidence for the correctness of CoT? To address these questions, we propose a method, namely Chain-of-Probe (CoP), to probe changes in the mind during the model's reasoning. The probing results show that in a significant number of question-answer cases, CoT appears to be unnecessary, and this necessity correlates with the simplicity of the task, defined by reasoning steps required. Furthermore, by analyzing patterns in mind change, we examine the correctness of the model's reasoning. Our validation reveals that many responses, although correct in their final answer, contain errors in their reasoning process. To this end, we propose a strategic approach based on CoP to prioritize answers with correct reasoning among multiple candidates, thereby bolstering the reliability of the model's reasoning.

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arXiv2025

ToolFlow: Boosting LLM Tool-Calling Through Natural and Coherent Dialogue Synthesis

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common method to enhance the tool calling capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), with the training data often being synthesized. The current data synthesis process generally involves sampling a set of tools, formulating a requirement based on these tools, and generating the call statements. However, tools sampled randomly lack relevance, making them difficult to combine and thus reducing the diversity of the data. Additionally, current work overlooks the coherence between turns of dialogues, leading to a gap between the synthesized data and real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a Graph-based Sampling strategy to sample more relevant tool combinations, and a Planned-generation strategy to create plans that guide the synthesis of coherent dialogues. We integrate these two strategies and enable multiple agents to synthesize the dialogue data interactively, resulting in our tool-calling data synthesis pipeline ToolFlow. Data quality assessments demonstrate improvements in the naturalness and coherence of our synthesized dialogues. Finally, we apply SFT on LLaMA-3.1-8B using 8,000 synthetic dialogues generated with ToolFlow. Results show that the model achieves tool-calling performance comparable to or even surpassing GPT-4, while maintaining strong general capabilities.

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arXiv2025

DAST: Difficulty-Aware Self-Training on Large Language Models

Present Large Language Models (LLM) self-training methods always under-sample on challenging queries, leading to inadequate learning on difficult problems which limits LLMs' ability. Therefore, this work proposes a difficulty-aware self-training (DAST) framework that focuses on improving both the quantity and quality of self-generated responses on challenging queries during self-training. DAST is specified in three components: 1) sampling-based difficulty level estimation, 2) difficulty-aware data augmentation, and 3) the self-training algorithm using SFT and DPO respectively. Experiments on mathematical tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of DAST, highlighting the critical role of difficulty-aware strategies in advancing LLM self-training.

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arXiv2025

DocPuzzle: A Process-Aware Benchmark for Evaluating Realistic Long-Context Reasoning Capabilities

We present DocPuzzle, a rigorously constructed benchmark for evaluating long-context reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). This benchmark comprises 100 expert-level QA problems requiring multi-step reasoning over long real-world documents. To ensure the task quality and complexity, we implement a human-AI collaborative annotation-validation pipeline. DocPuzzle introduces an innovative evaluation framework that mitigates guessing bias through checklist-guided process analysis, establishing new standards for assessing reasoning capacities in LLMs. Our evaluation results show that: 1)Advanced slow-thinking reasoning models like o1-preview(69.7%) and DeepSeek-R1(66.3%) significantly outperform best general instruct models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet(57.7%); 2)Distilled reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B(41.3%) falls far behind the teacher model, suggesting challenges to maintain the generalization of reasoning capabilities relying solely on distillation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

More Tokens, Lower Precision: Towards the Optimal Token-Precision Trade-off in KV Cache Compression

As large language models (LLMs) process increasing context windows, the memory usage of KV cache has become a critical bottleneck during inference. The mainstream KV compression methods, including KV pruning and KV quantization, primarily focus on either token or precision dimension separately. However, these works leaving the trade-off between these two orthogonal dimensions largely under-explored. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the token-precision trade-off in KV cache compression.Experiments demonstrate that storing more tokens in the KV cache with lower precision,a strategy we term quantized pruning, can significantly enhance the long-context performance of LLMs. In-depth analysis of the token-precision trade-off across key aspects demonstrates that, quantized pruning achieves substantial improvements in retrieval-related tasks and consistently performs well across varying input lengths. Furthermore, quantized pruning demonstrates notable stability and effectiveness across different KV pruning methods, quantization strategies, and model scales. These findings offer valuable insights into optimizing KV cache compression through balanced token-precision trade-off strategies. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhzihao/QPruningKV.

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arXiv2025

Bridging and Modeling Correlations in Pairwise Data for Direct Preference Optimization

Direct preference optimization (DPO), a widely adopted offline preference optimization algorithm, aims to align large language models (LLMs) with human-desired behaviors using pairwise preference data. However, the generation of the winning response and the losing response within pairwise data are typically isolated, leading to weak correlations between them as well as suboptimal alignment performance. To address this issue, we propose an effective framework for Bridging and Modeling Correlations in pairwise data, named BMC. Firstly, we increase the consistency and informativeness of the pairwise preference signals through targeted modifications, synthesizing a pseudo-winning response by improving the losing response with the winning response as a reference. Secondly, we identify that DPO alone is insufficient to model these correlations and capture nuanced variations. Therefore, we propose learning token-level correlations by dynamically leveraging the policy model's confidence during training. Comprehensive experiments on QA, math, and instruction-following tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, significantly surpassing competitive baselines, including DPO. Additionally, our in-depth quantitative analysis reveals the reasons behind our method's superior performance over DPO and showcases its versatility to other DPO variants. We release our repository at https://github.com/YJiangcm/BMC.

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arXiv2024

Data Management For Training Large Language Models: A Survey

Data plays a fundamental role in training Large Language Models (LLMs). Efficient data management, particularly in formulating a well-suited training dataset, is significant for enhancing model performance and improving training efficiency during pretraining and supervised fine-tuning stages. Despite the considerable importance of data management, the underlying mechanism of current prominent practices are still unknown. Consequently, the exploration of data management has attracted more and more attention among the research community. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of current research in data management within both the pretraining and supervised fine-tuning stages of LLMs, covering various aspects of data management strategy design. Looking into the future, we extrapolate existing challenges and outline promising directions for development in this field. Therefore, this survey serves as a guiding resource for practitioners aspiring to construct powerful LLMs through efficient data management practices. The collection of the latest papers is available at https://github.com/ZigeW/data_management_LLM.

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arXiv2024

M4LE: A Multi-Ability Multi-Range Multi-Task Multi-Domain Long-Context Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

Managing long sequences has become an important and necessary feature for large language models (LLMs). However, it is still an open question of how to comprehensively and systematically evaluate the long-sequence capability of LLMs. One of the reasons is that conventional and widely-used benchmarks mainly consist of short sequences. In this paper, we propose M4LE, a Multi-ability, Multi-range, Multi-task, Multi-domain benchmark for Long-context Evaluation. M4LE is based on a diverse NLP task pool comprising 36 NLP datasets, 11 task types and 12 domains. To alleviate the scarcity of tasks with naturally long sequences and incorporate multiple-ability assessment, we propose an automatic approach (but with negligible human annotations) to convert short-sequence tasks into a unified long-sequence scenario where LLMs have to identify single or multiple relevant spans in long contexts based on explicit or semantic hints. Specifically, the scenario includes five different types of abilities: (1) explicit single-span; (2) semantic single-span; (3) explicit multiple-span; (4) semantic multiple-span; and (5) global context understanding. The resulting samples in M4LE are evenly distributed from 1k to 8k input length. We conducted a systematic evaluation on 11 well-established LLMs, especially those optimized for long-sequence inputs. Our results reveal that: 1) Current LLMs struggle to understand long context, particularly when tasks require multiple-span attention. 2) Semantic retrieval task is more difficult for competent LLMs. 3) Models fine-tuned on longer text with position interpolation have comparable performance to those using Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) aware scaling methods without fine-tuning. We make our benchmark publicly available to encourage future research in this challenging area.

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arXiv2024

Prompt-Based Length Controlled Generation with Multiple Control Types

Large language models (LLMs) have attracted great attention given their strong performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. In practice, users often expect generated texts to fall within a specific length range, making length controlled generation an important topic, especially for GPT-style models. Existing length control methods mostly focus on a simple control type of "equal to" a target length. Different from them, we propose a prompt-based method to achieve length controlled generation under different control types with high accuracy. In particular, we adopt reinforcement learning (RL) and sample filtering with the reward signal given by rule-based reward models, which enhances the length control ability of models by rewarding outputs that follow certain control instructions. In addition, we introduce a standard prompt extractor to parse arbitrary users' input into standard control instructions. Experiments show that our method significantly improves the accuracy of prompt-based length control on popular summarization datasets like CNNDM and NYT under multiple control types. Moreover, both the standard prompt extractor and RL-tuned model show strong generalization to unseen control prompt templates.

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arXiv2024

FollowBench: A Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for Large Language Models

The ability to follow instructions is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle various real-world applications. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating pure response quality, rather than assessing whether the response follows constraints stated in the instruction. To fill this research gap, in this paper, we propose FollowBench, a Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs. FollowBench comprehensively includes five different types (i.e., Content, Situation, Style, Format, and Example) of fine-grained constraints. To enable a precise constraint following estimation on diverse difficulties, we introduce a Multi-level mechanism that incrementally adds a single constraint to the initial instruction at each increased level. To assess whether LLMs' outputs have satisfied every individual constraint, we propose to prompt strong LLMs with constraint-evolution paths to handle challenging open-ended instructions. By evaluating 13 closed-source and open-source popular LLMs on FollowBench, we highlight the weaknesses of LLMs in instruction following and point towards potential avenues for future work. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/YJiangcm/FollowBench.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Learning to Edit: Aligning LLMs with Knowledge Editing

Knowledge editing techniques, aiming to efficiently modify a minor proportion of knowledge in large language models (LLMs) without negatively impacting performance across other inputs, have garnered widespread attention. However, existing methods predominantly rely on memorizing the updated knowledge, impeding LLMs from effectively combining the new knowledge with their inherent knowledge when answering questions. To this end, we propose a Learning to Edit (LTE) framework, focusing on teaching LLMs to apply updated knowledge into input questions, inspired by the philosophy of "Teach a man to fish." LTE features a two-phase process: (i) the Alignment Phase, which fine-tunes LLMs on a meticulously curated parallel dataset to make reliable, in-scope edits while preserving out-of-scope information and linguistic proficiency; and (ii) the Inference Phase, which employs a retrieval-based mechanism for real-time and mass knowledge editing. By comparing our approach with seven advanced baselines across four popular knowledge editing benchmarks and two LLM architectures, we demonstrate LTE's superiority in knowledge editing performance, robustness in both batch and sequential editing, minimal interference on general tasks, and rapid editing speeds. The data and code are available at https://github.com/YJiangcm/LTE.

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arXiv2024

PROXYQA: An Alternative Framework for Evaluating Long-Form Text Generation with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have succeeded remarkably in understanding long-form contents. However, exploring their capability for generating long-form contents, such as reports and articles, has been relatively unexplored and inadequately assessed by existing benchmarks. The prevalent evaluation methods, which predominantly rely on crowdsourcing, are recognized for their labor-intensive nature and lack of efficiency, whereas automated metrics, such as the ROUGE score, demonstrate discordance with human judgment criteria. In this paper, we propose ProxyQA, an innovative framework dedicated to assessing long-text generation. ProxyQA comprises in-depth human-curated meta-questions spanning various domains, each accompanied by specific proxy-questions with pre-annotated answers. LLMs are tasked to generate extensive content in response to these meta-questions, by engaging an evaluator and incorporating the generated texts as contextual background, ProxyQA assesses the generated content's quality through the evaluator's accuracy in addressing the proxy-questions. We examine multiple LLMs, emphasizing ProxyQA's demanding nature as a high-quality assessment tool. Human evaluation demonstrates that the proxy-question method is notably self-consistent and aligns closely with human evaluative standards. The dataset and leaderboard is available at \url{https://proxy-qa.com}.

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arXiv2024

Planning, Creation, Usage: Benchmarking LLMs for Comprehensive Tool Utilization in Real-World Complex Scenarios

The recent trend of using Large Language Models (LLMs) as tool agents in real-world applications underscores the necessity for comprehensive evaluations of their capabilities, particularly in complex scenarios involving planning, creating, and using tools. However, existing benchmarks typically focus on simple synthesized queries that do not reflect real-world complexity, thereby offering limited perspectives in evaluating tool utilization. To address this issue, we present UltraTool, a novel benchmark designed to improve and evaluate LLMs' ability in tool utilization within real-world scenarios. UltraTool focuses on the entire process of using tools - from planning and creating to applying them in complex tasks. It emphasizes real-world complexities, demanding accurate, multi-step planning for effective problem-solving. A key feature of UltraTool is its independent evaluation of planning with natural language, which happens before tool usage and simplifies the task solving by mapping out the intermediate steps. Thus, unlike previous work, it eliminates the restriction of pre-defined toolset. Through extensive experiments on various LLMs, we offer novel insights into the evaluation of capabilities of LLMs in tool utilization, thereby contributing a fresh perspective to this rapidly evolving field. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/JoeYing1019/UltraTool.

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arXiv2024

Evaluating the External and Parametric Knowledge Fusion of Large Language Models

Integrating external knowledge into large language models (LLMs) presents a promising solution to overcome the limitations imposed by their antiquated and static parametric memory. Prior studies, however, have tended to over-reliance on external knowledge, underestimating the valuable contributions of an LLMs' intrinsic parametric knowledge. The efficacy of LLMs in blending external and parametric knowledge remains largely unexplored, especially in cases where external knowledge is incomplete and necessitates supplementation by their parametric knowledge. We propose to deconstruct knowledge fusion into four distinct scenarios, offering the first thorough investigation of LLM behavior across each. We develop a systematic pipeline for data construction and knowledge infusion to simulate these fusion scenarios, facilitating a series of controlled experiments. Our investigation reveals that enhancing parametric knowledge within LLMs can significantly bolster their capability for knowledge integration. Nonetheless, we identify persistent challenges in memorizing and eliciting parametric knowledge, and determining parametric knowledge boundaries. Our findings aim to steer future explorations on harmonizing external and parametric knowledge within LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Does the Generator Mind its Contexts? An Analysis of Generative Model Faithfulness under Context Transfer

The present study introduces the knowledge-augmented generator, which is specifically designed to produce information that remains grounded in contextual knowledge, regardless of alterations in the context. Previous research has predominantly focused on examining hallucinations stemming from static input, such as in the domains of summarization or machine translation. However, our investigation delves into the faithfulness of generative question answering in the presence of dynamic knowledge. Our objective is to explore the existence of hallucinations arising from parametric memory when contextual knowledge undergoes changes, while also analyzing the underlying causes for their occurrence. In order to efficiently address this issue, we propose a straightforward yet effective measure for detecting such hallucinations. Intriguingly, our investigation uncovers that all models exhibit a tendency to generate previous answers as hallucinations. To gain deeper insights into the underlying causes of this phenomenon, we conduct a series of experiments that verify the critical role played by context in hallucination, both during training and testing, from various perspectives.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

G-MAP: General Memory-Augmented Pre-trained Language Model for Domain Tasks

Recently, domain-specific PLMs have been proposed to boost the task performance of specific domains (e.g., biomedical and computer science) by continuing to pre-train general PLMs with domain-specific corpora. However, this Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training (DAPT; Gururangan et al. (2020)) tends to forget the previous general knowledge acquired by general PLMs, which leads to a catastrophic forgetting phenomenon and sub-optimal performance. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new framework of General Memory Augmented Pre-trained Language Model (G-MAP), which augments the domain-specific PLM by a memory representation built from the frozen general PLM without losing any general knowledge. Specifically, we propose a new memory-augmented layer, and based on it, different augmented strategies are explored to build the memory representation and then adaptively fuse it into the domain-specific PLM. We demonstrate the effectiveness of G-MAP on various domains (biomedical and computer science publications, news, and reviews) and different kinds (text classification, QA, NER) of tasks, and the extensive results show that the proposed G-MAP can achieve SOTA results on all tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Gaining Wisdom from Setbacks: Aligning Large Language Models via Mistake Analysis

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has not only provided numerous opportunities but also presented significant challenges. This becomes particularly evident when LLMs inadvertently generate harmful or toxic content, either unintentionally or because of intentional inducement. Existing alignment methods usually direct LLMs toward the favorable outcomes by utilizing human-annotated, flawless instruction-response pairs. Conversely, this study proposes a novel alignment technique based on mistake analysis, which deliberately exposes LLMs to erroneous content to learn the reasons for mistakes and how to avoid them. In this case, mistakes are repurposed into valuable data for alignment, effectively helping to avoid the production of erroneous responses. Without external models or human annotations, our method leverages a model's intrinsic ability to discern undesirable mistakes and improves the safety of its generated responses. Experimental results reveal that our method outperforms existing alignment approaches in enhancing model safety while maintaining the overall utility.

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