Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Tao Gui

Publications and source records attributed to Tao Gui.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

Improving Generalization of Alignment with Human Preferences through Group Invariant Learning

The success of AI assistants based on language models (LLMs) hinges crucially on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which enables the generation of responses more aligned with human preferences. As universal AI assistants, there's a growing expectation for them to perform consistently across various domains. However, previous work shows that Reinforcement Learning (RL) often exploits shortcuts to attain high rewards and overlooks challenging samples. This focus on quick reward gains undermines both the stability in training and the model's ability to generalize to new, unseen data. In this work, we propose a novel approach that can learn a consistent policy via RL across various data groups or domains. Given the challenges associated with acquiring group annotations, our method automatically classifies data into different groups, deliberately maximizing performance variance. Then, we optimize the policy to perform well on challenging groups. Lastly, leveraging the established groups, our approach adaptively adjusts the exploration space, allocating more learning capacity to more challenging data and preventing the model from over-optimizing on simpler data. Experimental results indicate that our approach significantly enhances training stability and model generalization.

cs.LG↗

A Comprehensive Capability Analysis of GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 Series Models

GPT series models, such as GPT-3, CodeX, InstructGPT, ChatGPT, and so on, have gained considerable attention due to their exceptional natural language processing capabilities. However, despite the abundance of research on the difference in capabilities between GPT series models and fine-tuned models, there has been limited attention given to the evolution of GPT series models' capabilities over time. To conduct a comprehensive analysis of the capabilities of GPT series models, we select six representative models, comprising two GPT-3 series models (i.e., davinci and text-davinci-001) and four GPT-3.5 series models (i.e., code-davinci-002, text-davinci-002, text-davinci-003, and gpt-3.5-turbo). We evaluate their performance on nine natural language understanding (NLU) tasks using 21 datasets. In particular, we compare the performance and robustness of different models for each task under zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Our extensive experiments reveal that the overall ability of GPT series models on NLU tasks does not increase gradually as the models evolve, especially with the introduction of the RLHF training strategy. While this strategy enhances the models' ability to generate human-like responses, it also compromises their ability to solve some tasks. Furthermore, our findings indicate that there is still room for improvement in areas such as model robustness.

cs.CL↗

RethinkingTMSC: An Empirical Study for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification

Recently, Target-oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (TMSC) has gained significant attention among scholars. However, current multimodal models have reached a performance bottleneck. To investigate the causes of this problem, we perform extensive empirical evaluation and in-depth analysis of the datasets to answer the following questions: Q1: Are the modalities equally important for TMSC? Q2: Which multimodal fusion modules are more effective? Q3: Do existing datasets adequately support the research? Our experiments and analyses reveal that the current TMSC systems primarily rely on the textual modality, as most of targets' sentiments can be determined solely by text. Consequently, we point out several directions to work on for the TMSC task in terms of model design and dataset construction. The code and data can be found in https://github.com/Junjie-Ye/RethinkingTMSC.

cs.CL↗

LLMEval: A Preliminary Study on How to Evaluate Large Language Models

Recently, the evaluation of Large Language Models has emerged as a popular area of research. The three crucial questions for LLM evaluation are ``what, where, and how to evaluate''. However, the existing research mainly focuses on the first two questions, which are basically what tasks to give the LLM during testing and what kind of knowledge it should deal with. As for the third question, which is about what standards to use, the types of evaluators, how to score, and how to rank, there hasn't been much discussion. In this paper, we analyze evaluation methods by comparing various criteria with both manual and automatic evaluation, utilizing onsite, crowd-sourcing, public annotators and GPT-4, with different scoring methods and ranking systems. We propose a new dataset, LLMEval and conduct evaluations on 20 LLMs. A total of 2,186 individuals participated, leading to the generation of 243,337 manual annotations and 57,511 automatic evaluation results. We perform comparisons and analyses of different settings and conduct 10 conclusions that can provide some insights for evaluating LLM in the future. The dataset and the results are publicly available at https://github.com/llmeval .

cs.AI↗

Loose lips sink ships: Mitigating Length Bias in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Reinforcement learning from human feedback serves as a crucial bridge, aligning large language models with human and societal values. This alignment requires a vast corpus of human feedback to learn a reward model, which is subsequently used to finetune language models. However, we have identified that the reward model often finds shortcuts to bypass its intended objectives, misleadingly assuming that humans prefer longer responses. The emergence of length bias often induces the model to favor longer outputs, yet it doesn't equate to an increase in helpful information within these outputs. In this paper, we propose an innovative solution, applying the Product-of-Experts (PoE) technique to separate reward modeling from the influence of sequence length. In our framework, the main expert concentrates on understanding human intents, while the biased expert targets the identification and capture of length bias. To further enhance the learning of bias, we introduce perturbations into the bias-focused expert, disrupting the flow of semantic information. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach, indicating that language model performance is improved, irrespective of sequence length.

cs.CL↗

Making Harmful Behaviors Unlearnable for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential as general-purpose AI assistants in various domains. To meet the requirements of different applications, LLMs are often customized by further fine-tuning. However, the powerful learning ability of LLMs not only enables them to acquire new tasks but also makes them susceptible to learning undesired behaviors. For example, even safety-aligned LLMs can be easily fine-tuned into harmful assistants as the fine-tuning data often contains implicit or explicit harmful content. Can we train LLMs on harmful data without learning harmful behaviors? This paper proposes a controllable training framework that makes harmful behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process. Specifically, we introduce ``security vectors'', a few new parameters that can be separated from the LLM, to ensure LLM's responses are consistent with the harmful behavior. Security vectors are activated during fine-tuning, the consistent behavior makes LLM believe that such behavior has already been learned, there is no need to further optimize for harmful data. During inference, we can deactivate security vectors to restore the LLM's normal behavior. The experimental results show that the security vectors generated by 100 harmful samples are enough to prevent LLM from learning 1000 harmful samples, while preserving the ability to learn other useful information.

cs.LG↗

Unveiling A Core Linguistic Region in Large Language Models

Brain localization, which describes the association between specific regions of the brain and their corresponding functions, is widely accepted in the field of cognitive science as an objective fact. Today's large language models (LLMs) possess human-level linguistic competence and can execute complex tasks requiring abstract knowledge and reasoning. To deeply understand the inherent mechanisms of intelligence emergence in LLMs, this paper conducts an analogical research using brain localization as a prototype. We have discovered a core region in LLMs that corresponds to linguistic competence, accounting for approximately 1% of the total model parameters. This core region exhibits significant dimension dependency, and perturbations to even a single parameter on specific dimensions can lead to a loss of linguistic competence. Furthermore, we observe that an improvement in linguistic competence does not necessarily accompany an elevation in the model's knowledge level, which might imply the existence of regions of domain knowledge that are dissociated from the linguistic region. Overall, exploring the LLMs' functional regions provides insights into the foundation of their intelligence. In the future, we will continue to investigate knowledge regions within LLMs and the interactions between them.

cs.CL↗

Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning

Benefiting from massive corpora and advanced hardware, large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. However, their performance degrades in scenarios where multiple tasks are encountered sequentially, also known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose orthogonal low-rank adaptation (O-LoRA), a simple and efficient approach for continual learning in language models, effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting while learning new tasks. Specifically, O-LoRA learns tasks in different (low-rank) vector subspaces that are kept orthogonal to each other in order to minimize interference. Our method induces only marginal additional parameter costs and requires no user data storage for replay. Experimental results on continual learning benchmarks show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, compared to previous approaches, our method excels in preserving the generalization ability of LLMs on unseen tasks.

cs.CL↗

Reading Order Matters: Information Extraction from Visually-rich Documents by Token Path Prediction

Recent advances in multimodal pre-trained models have significantly improved information extraction from visually-rich documents (VrDs), in which named entity recognition (NER) is treated as a sequence-labeling task of predicting the BIO entity tags for tokens, following the typical setting of NLP. However, BIO-tagging scheme relies on the correct order of model inputs, which is not guaranteed in real-world NER on scanned VrDs where text are recognized and arranged by OCR systems. Such reading order issue hinders the accurate marking of entities by BIO-tagging scheme, making it impossible for sequence-labeling methods to predict correct named entities. To address the reading order issue, we introduce Token Path Prediction (TPP), a simple prediction head to predict entity mentions as token sequences within documents. Alternative to token classification, TPP models the document layout as a complete directed graph of tokens, and predicts token paths within the graph as entities. For better evaluation of VrD-NER systems, we also propose two revised benchmark datasets of NER on scanned documents which can reflect real-world scenarios. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and suggest its potential to be a universal solution to various information extraction tasks on documents.

cs.CL↗

RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models' Human-like Behavior Mechanisms

Reports of human-like behaviors in foundation models are growing, with psychological theories providing enduring tools to investigate these behaviors. However, current research tends to directly apply these human-oriented tools without verifying the faithfulness of their outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a framework, RealBehavior, which is designed to characterize the humanoid behaviors of models faithfully. Beyond simply measuring behaviors, our framework assesses the faithfulness of results based on reproducibility, internal and external consistency, and generalizability. Our findings suggest that a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-like behaviors. Moreover, we discuss the impacts of aligning models with human and social values, arguing for the necessity of diversifying alignment objectives to prevent the creation of models with restricted characteristics.

cs.CL↗

Universal Multi-modal Entity Alignment via Iteratively Fusing Modality Similarity Paths

The objective of Entity Alignment (EA) is to identify equivalent entity pairs from multiple Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and create a more comprehensive and unified KG. The majority of EA methods have primarily focused on the structural modality of KGs, lacking exploration of multi-modal information. A few multi-modal EA methods have made good attempts in this field. Still, they have two shortcomings: (1) inconsistent and inefficient modality modeling that designs complex and distinct models for each modality; (2) ineffective modality fusion due to the heterogeneous nature of modalities in EA. To tackle these challenges, we propose PathFusion, consisting of two main components: (1) MSP, a unified modeling approach that simplifies the alignment process by constructing paths connecting entities and modality nodes to represent multiple modalities; (2) IRF, an iterative fusion method that effectively combines information from different modalities using the path as an information carrier. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of PathFusion over state-of-the-art methods, with 22.4%-28.9% absolute improvement on Hits@1, and 0.194-0.245 absolute improvement on MRR.

cs.CL↗

TRACE: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Continual Learning in Large Language Models

Aligned large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in task-solving, following instructions, and ensuring safety. However, the continual learning aspect of these aligned LLMs has been largely overlooked. Existing continual learning benchmarks lack sufficient challenge for leading aligned LLMs, owing to both their simplicity and the models' potential exposure during instruction tuning. In this paper, we introduce TRACE, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate continual learning in LLMs. TRACE consists of 8 distinct datasets spanning challenging tasks including domain-specific tasks, multilingual capabilities, code generation, and mathematical reasoning. All datasets are standardized into a unified format, allowing for effortless automatic evaluation of LLMs. Our experiments show that after training on TRACE, aligned LLMs exhibit significant declines in both general ability and instruction-following capabilities. For example, the accuracy of llama2-chat 13B on gsm8k dataset declined precipitously from 28.8\% to 2\% after training on our datasets. This highlights the challenge of finding a suitable tradeoff between achieving performance on specific tasks while preserving the original prowess of LLMs. Empirical findings suggest that tasks inherently equipped with reasoning paths contribute significantly to preserving certain capabilities of LLMs against potential declines. Motivated by this, we introduce the Reasoning-augmented Continual Learning (RCL) approach. RCL integrates task-specific cues with meta-rationales, effectively reducing catastrophic forgetting in LLMs while expediting convergence on novel tasks.

cs.CL↗

The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey

For a long time, humanity has pursued artificial intelligence (AI) equivalent to or surpassing the human level, with AI agents considered a promising vehicle for this pursuit. AI agents are artificial entities that sense their environment, make decisions, and take actions. Many efforts have been made to develop intelligent agents, but they mainly focus on advancement in algorithms or training strategies to enhance specific capabilities or performance on particular tasks. Actually, what the community lacks is a general and powerful model to serve as a starting point for designing AI agents that can adapt to diverse scenarios. Due to the versatile capabilities they demonstrate, large language models (LLMs) are regarded as potential sparks for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), offering hope for building general AI agents. Many researchers have leveraged LLMs as the foundation to build AI agents and have achieved significant progress. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive survey on LLM-based agents. We start by tracing the concept of agents from its philosophical origins to its development in AI, and explain why LLMs are suitable foundations for agents. Building upon this, we present a general framework for LLM-based agents, comprising three main components: brain, perception, and action, and the framework can be tailored for different applications. Subsequently, we explore the extensive applications of LLM-based agents in three aspects: single-agent scenarios, multi-agent scenarios, and human-agent cooperation. Following this, we delve into agent societies, exploring the behavior and personality of LLM-based agents, the social phenomena that emerge from an agent society, and the insights they offer for human society. Finally, we discuss several key topics and open problems within the field. A repository for the related papers at https://github.com/WooooDyy/LLM-Agent-Paper-List.

cs.AI↗

Towards Understanding the Capability of Large Language Models on Code Clone Detection: A Survey

Code cloning, the duplication of code fragments, is common in software development. While some reuse aids productivity, excessive cloning hurts maintainability and introduces bugs. Hence, automatic code clone detection is vital. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) possess diverse code-related knowledge, making them versatile for various software engineering challenges. However, LLMs' performance in code clone detection is unclear and needs more study for accurate assessment. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive evaluation of LLMs for clone detection, covering different clone types, languages, and prompts. We find advanced LLMs excel in detecting complex semantic clones, surpassing existing methods. Adding intermediate reasoning steps via chain-of-thought prompts noticeably enhances performance. Additionally, representing code as vector embeddings, especially with text encoders, effectively aids clone detection.Lastly, the ability of LLMs to detect code clones differs among various programming languages. Our study suggests that LLMs have potential for clone detection due to their language capabilities, offering insights for developing robust LLM-based methods to enhance software engineering.

cs.SE↗

Flexible Coherent Optical Access: Architectures, Algorithms, and Demonstrations

To cope with the explosive bandwidth demand, significant progress has been made in the ITU-T standardization sector to define a higher-speed passive optical network (PON) with a 50Gb/s line rate. Recently, 50G PON becomes mature gradually, which means it is time to discuss beyond 50G PON. For ensuring an acceptable optical power budget, beyond 50G PON will potentially use coherent technologies, which can simultaneously promote the applications of flexible multiple access such as time/frequency-domain multiple access (TFDMA). In this paper, we will introduce the architectures, algorithms, and demonstrations for TFDMA-based coherent PON. The system architectures based on an ultra-simple coherent transceiver and specific signal spectra are designed to greatly reduce the cost of ONUs. Meanwhile, fast and low-complexity digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms are proposed for dealing with upstream and downstream signals. Based on the architectures and algorithms, we experimentally demonstrate the first real-time TFDMA-based coherent PON, which can support at most 256 end users, and peak line rates of 100Gb/s and 200Gb/s in the upstream and downstream scenarios, respectively. In conclusion, the proposed technologies for the coherent PON make it more possible to be applied in the future beyond 50G PON.

cs.NI↗

A Confidence-based Partial Label Learning Model for Crowd-Annotated Named Entity Recognition

Existing models for named entity recognition (NER) are mainly based on large-scale labeled datasets, which always obtain using crowdsourcing. However, it is hard to obtain a unified and correct label via majority voting from multiple annotators for NER due to the large labeling space and complexity of this task. To address this problem, we aim to utilize the original multi-annotator labels directly. Particularly, we propose a Confidence-based Partial Label Learning (CPLL) method to integrate the prior confidence (given by annotators) and posterior confidences (learned by models) for crowd-annotated NER. This model learns a token- and content-dependent confidence via an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm by minimizing empirical risk. The true posterior estimator and confidence estimator perform iteratively to update the true posterior and confidence respectively. We conduct extensive experimental results on both real-world and synthetic datasets, which show that our model can improve performance effectively compared with strong baselines.

cs.CL↗

Learning "O" Helps for Learning More: Handling the Concealed Entity Problem for Class-incremental NER

As the categories of named entities rapidly increase, the deployed NER models are required to keep updating toward recognizing more entity types, creating a demand for class-incremental learning for NER. Considering the privacy concerns and storage constraints, the standard paradigm for class-incremental NER updates the models with training data only annotated with the new classes, yet the entities from other entity classes are unlabeled, regarded as "Non-entity" (or "O"). In this work, we conduct an empirical study on the "Unlabeled Entity Problem" and find that it leads to severe confusion between "O" and entities, decreasing class discrimination of old classes and declining the model's ability to learn new classes. To solve the Unlabeled Entity Problem, we propose a novel representation learning method to learn discriminative representations for the entity classes and "O". Specifically, we propose an entity-aware contrastive learning method that adaptively detects entity clusters in "O". Furthermore, we propose two effective distance-based relabeling strategies for better learning the old classes. We introduce a more realistic and challenging benchmark for class-incremental NER, and the proposed method achieves up to 10.62\% improvement over the baseline methods.

cs.CL↗

Secrets of RLHF in Large Language Models Part I: PPO

Large language models (LLMs) have formulated a blueprint for the advancement of artificial general intelligence. Its primary objective is to function as a human-centric (helpful, honest, and harmless) assistant. Alignment with humans assumes paramount significance, and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) emerges as the pivotal technological paradigm underpinning this pursuit. Current technical routes usually include \textbf{reward models} to measure human preferences, \textbf{Proximal Policy Optimization} (PPO) to optimize policy model outputs, and \textbf{process supervision} to improve step-by-step reasoning capabilities. However, due to the challenges of reward design, environment interaction, and agent training, coupled with huge trial and error cost of large language models, there is a significant barrier for AI researchers to motivate the development of technical alignment and safe landing of LLMs. The stable training of RLHF has still been a puzzle. In the first report, we dissect the framework of RLHF, re-evaluate the inner workings of PPO, and explore how the parts comprising PPO algorithms impact policy agent training. We identify policy constraints being the key factor for the effective implementation of the PPO algorithm. Therefore, we explore the PPO-max, an advanced version of PPO algorithm, to efficiently improve the training stability of the policy model. Based on our main results, we perform a comprehensive analysis of RLHF abilities compared with SFT models and ChatGPT. The absence of open-source implementations has posed significant challenges to the investigation of LLMs alignment. Therefore, we are eager to release technical reports, reward models and PPO codes, aiming to make modest contributions to the advancement of LLMs.

cs.CL↗