arXiv subjects

Xiaozhi Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaozhi Wang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Constraint Back-translation Improves Complex Instruction Following of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) struggle to follow instructions with complex constraints in format, length, etc. Following the conventional instruction-tuning practice, previous works conduct post-training on complex instruction-response pairs generated by feeding complex instructions to advanced LLMs. However, even advanced LLMs cannot follow complex instructions well, thus limiting the quality of generated data. In this work, we find that existing datasets inherently contain implicit complex constraints and propose a novel data generation technique, constraint back-translation. Specifically, we take the high-quality instruction-response pairs in existing datasets and only adopt advanced LLMs to add complex constraints already met by the responses to the instructions, which naturally reduces costs and data noise. In the experiments, we adopt Llama3-70B-Instruct to back-translate constraints and create a high-quality complex instruction-response dataset, named CRAB. We present that post-training on CRAB improves multiple backbone LLMs' complex instruction-following ability, evaluated on extensive instruction-following benchmarks. We further find that constraint back-translation also serves as a useful auxiliary training objective in post-training. Our code, data, and models will be released to facilitate future research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Toward Generalizable Evaluation in the LLM Era: A Survey Beyond Benchmarks

Large Language Models (LLMs) are advancing at an amazing speed and have become indispensable across academia, industry, and daily applications. To keep pace with the status quo, this survey probes the core challenges that the rise of LLMs poses for evaluation. We identify and analyze two pivotal transitions: (i) from task-specific to capability-based evaluation, which reorganizes benchmarks around core competencies such as knowledge, reasoning, instruction following, multi-modal understanding, and safety; and (ii) from manual to automated evaluation, encompassing dynamic dataset curation and "LLM-as-a-judge" scoring. Yet, even with these transitions, a crucial obstacle persists: the evaluation generalization issue. Bounded test sets cannot scale alongside models whose abilities grow seemingly without limit. We will dissect this issue, along with the core challenges of the above two transitions, from the perspectives of methods, datasets, evaluators, and metrics. Due to the fast evolving of this field, we will maintain a living GitHub repository (links are in each section) to crowd-source updates and corrections, and warmly invite contributors and collaborators.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Precise Localization of Memories: A Fine-grained Neuron-level Knowledge Editing Technique for LLMs

Knowledge editing aims to update outdated information in Large Language Models (LLMs). A representative line of study is locate-then-edit methods, which typically employ causal tracing to identify the modules responsible for recalling factual knowledge about entities. However, we find these methods are often sensitive only to changes in the subject entity, leaving them less effective at adapting to changes in relations. This limitation results in poor editing locality, which can lead to the persistence of irrelevant or inaccurate facts, ultimately compromising the reliability of LLMs. We believe this issue arises from the insufficient precision of knowledge localization. To address this, we propose a Fine-grained Neuron-level Knowledge Editing (FiNE) method that enhances editing locality without affecting overall success rates. By precisely identifying and modifying specific neurons within feed-forward networks, FiNE significantly improves knowledge localization and editing. Quantitative experiments demonstrate that FiNE efficiently achieves better overall performance compared to existing techniques, providing new insights into the localization and modification of knowledge within LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Agentic Reward Modeling: Integrating Human Preferences with Verifiable Correctness Signals for Reliable Reward Systems

Reward models (RMs) are crucial for the training and inference-time scaling up of large language models (LLMs). However, existing reward models primarily focus on human preferences, neglecting verifiable correctness signals which have shown strong potential in training LLMs. In this paper, we propose agentic reward modeling, a reward system that combines reward models with verifiable correctness signals from different aspects to provide reliable rewards. We empirically implement a reward agent, named RewardAgent, that combines human preference rewards with two verifiable signals: factuality and instruction following, to provide more reliable rewards. We conduct comprehensive experiments on existing reward model benchmarks and inference time best-of-n searches on real-world downstream tasks. RewardAgent significantly outperforms vanilla reward models, demonstrating its effectiveness. We further construct training preference pairs using RewardAgent and train an LLM with the DPO objective, achieving superior performance on various NLP benchmarks compared to conventional reward models. Our codes are publicly released to facilitate further research (https://github.com/THU-KEG/Agentic-Reward-Modeling).

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Preserving Knowledge Invariance: Rethinking Robustness Evaluation of Open Information Extraction

The robustness to distribution changes ensures that NLP models can be successfully applied in the realistic world, especially for information extraction tasks. However, most prior evaluation benchmarks have been devoted to validating pairwise matching correctness, ignoring the crucial measurement of robustness. In this paper, we present the first benchmark that simulates the evaluation of open information extraction models in the real world, where the syntactic and expressive distributions under the same knowledge meaning may drift variously. We design and annotate a large-scale testbed in which each example is a knowledge-invariant clique that consists of sentences with structured knowledge of the same meaning but with different syntactic and expressive forms. By further elaborating the robustness metric, a model is judged to be robust if its performance is consistently accurate on the overall cliques. We perform experiments on typical models published in the last decade as well as a popular large language model, the results show that the existing successful models exhibit a frustrating degradation, with a maximum drop of 23.43 F1 score. Our resources and code are available at https://github.com/qijimrc/ROBUST.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks

This paper introduces LongBench v2, a benchmark designed to assess the ability of LLMs to handle long-context problems requiring deep understanding and reasoning across real-world multitasks. LongBench v2 consists of 503 challenging multiple-choice questions, with contexts ranging from 8k to 2M words, across six major task categories: single-document QA, multi-document QA, long in-context learning, long-dialogue history understanding, code repository understanding, and long structured data understanding. To ensure the breadth and the practicality, we collect data from nearly 100 highly educated individuals with diverse professional backgrounds. We employ both automated and manual review processes to maintain high quality and difficulty, resulting in human experts achieving only 53.7% accuracy under a 15-minute time constraint. Our evaluation reveals that the best-performing model, when directly answers the questions, achieves only 50.1% accuracy. In contrast, the o1-preview model, which includes longer reasoning, achieves 57.7%, surpassing the human baseline by 4%. These results highlight the importance of enhanced reasoning ability and scaling inference-time compute to tackle the long-context challenges in LongBench v2. The project is available at https://longbench2.github.io.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

ADELIE: Aligning Large Language Models on Information Extraction

Large language models (LLMs) usually fall short on information extraction (IE) tasks and struggle to follow the complex instructions of IE tasks. This primarily arises from LLMs not being aligned with humans, as mainstream alignment datasets typically do not include IE data. In this paper, we introduce ADELIE (Aligning large language moDELs on Information Extraction), an aligned LLM that effectively solves various IE tasks, including closed IE, open IE, and on-demand IE. We first collect and construct a high-quality alignment corpus IEInstruct for IE. Then we train ADELIE_SFT using instruction tuning on IEInstruct. We further train ADELIE_SFT with direct preference optimization (DPO) objective, resulting in ADELIE_DPO. Extensive experiments on various held-out IE datasets demonstrate that our models (ADELIE_SFT and ADELIE_DPO) achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance among open-source models. We further explore the general capabilities of ADELIE, and experimental results reveal that their general capabilities do not exhibit a noticeable decline. We will release the code, data, and models to facilitate further research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Configurable Foundation Models: Building LLMs from a Modular Perspective

Advancements in LLMs have recently unveiled challenges tied to computational efficiency and continual scalability due to their requirements of huge parameters, making the applications and evolution of these models on devices with limited computation resources and scenarios requiring various abilities increasingly cumbersome. Inspired by modularity within the human brain, there is a growing tendency to decompose LLMs into numerous functional modules, allowing for inference with part of modules and dynamic assembly of modules to tackle complex tasks, such as mixture-of-experts. To highlight the inherent efficiency and composability of the modular approach, we coin the term brick to represent each functional module, designating the modularized structure as configurable foundation models. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive overview and investigation of the construction, utilization, and limitation of configurable foundation models. We first formalize modules into emergent bricks - functional neuron partitions that emerge during the pre-training phase, and customized bricks - bricks constructed via additional post-training to improve the capabilities and knowledge of LLMs. Based on diverse functional bricks, we further present four brick-oriented operations: retrieval and routing, merging, updating, and growing. These operations allow for dynamic configuration of LLMs based on instructions to handle complex tasks. To verify our perspective, we conduct an empirical analysis on widely-used LLMs. We find that the FFN layers follow modular patterns with functional specialization of neurons and functional neuron partitions. Finally, we highlight several open issues and directions for future research. Overall, this paper aims to offer a fresh modular perspective on existing LLM research and inspire the future creation of more efficient and scalable foundational models.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

OpenEP: Open-Ended Future Event Prediction

Future event prediction (FEP) is a long-standing and crucial task in the world, as understanding the evolution of events enables early risk identification, informed decision-making, and strategic planning. Existing work typically treats event prediction as classification tasks and confines the outcomes of future events to a fixed scope, such as yes/no questions, candidate set, and taxonomy, which is difficult to include all possible outcomes of future events. In this paper, we introduce OpenEP (an Open-Ended Future Event Prediction task), which generates flexible and diverse predictions aligned with real-world scenarios. This is mainly reflected in two aspects: firstly, the predictive questions are diverse, covering different stages of event development and perspectives; secondly, the outcomes are flexible, without constraints on scope or format. To facilitate the study of this task, we construct OpenEPBench, an open-ended future event prediction dataset. For question construction, we pose questions from seven perspectives, including location, time, event development, event outcome, event impact, event response, and other, to facilitate an in-depth analysis and understanding of the comprehensive evolution of events. For outcome construction, we collect free-form text containing the outcomes as ground truth to provide semantically complete and detail-enriched outcomes. Furthermore, we propose StkFEP, a stakeholder-enhanced future event prediction framework, that incorporates event characteristics for open-ended settings. Our method extracts stakeholders involved in events to extend questions to gather diverse information. We also collect historically events that are relevant and similar to the question to reveal potential evolutionary patterns. Experiment results indicate that accurately predicting future events in open-ended settings is challenging for existing LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

MAVEN-Fact: A Large-scale Event Factuality Detection Dataset

Event Factuality Detection (EFD) task determines the factuality of textual events, i.e., classifying whether an event is a fact, possibility, or impossibility, which is essential for faithfully understanding and utilizing event knowledge. However, due to the lack of high-quality large-scale data, event factuality detection is under-explored in event understanding research, which limits the development of EFD community. To address these issues and provide faithful event understanding, we introduce MAVEN-Fact, a large-scale and high-quality EFD dataset based on the MAVEN dataset. MAVEN-Fact includes factuality annotations of 112,276 events, making it the largest EFD dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAVEN-Fact is challenging for both conventional fine-tuned models and large language models (LLMs). Thanks to the comprehensive annotations of event arguments and relations in MAVEN, MAVEN-Fact also supports some further analyses and we find that adopting event arguments and relations helps in event factuality detection for fine-tuned models but does not benefit LLMs. Furthermore, we preliminarily study an application case of event factuality detection and find it helps in mitigating event-related hallucination in LLMs. Our dataset and codes can be obtained from \url{https://github.com/lcy2723/MAVEN-FACT}

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

KoLA: Carefully Benchmarking World Knowledge of Large Language Models

The unprecedented performance of large language models (LLMs) necessitates improvements in evaluations. Rather than merely exploring the breadth of LLM abilities, we believe meticulous and thoughtful designs are essential to thorough, unbiased, and applicable evaluations. Given the importance of world knowledge to LLMs, we construct a Knowledge-oriented LLM Assessment benchmark (KoLA), in which we carefully design three crucial factors: (1) For \textbf{ability modeling}, we mimic human cognition to form a four-level taxonomy of knowledge-related abilities, covering $19$ tasks. (2) For \textbf{data}, to ensure fair comparisons, we use both Wikipedia, a corpus prevalently pre-trained by LLMs, along with continuously collected emerging corpora, aiming to evaluate the capacity to handle unseen data and evolving knowledge. (3) For \textbf{evaluation criteria}, we adopt a contrastive system, including overall standard scores for better numerical comparability across tasks and models and a unique self-contrast metric for automatically evaluating knowledge-creating ability. We evaluate $28$ open-source and commercial LLMs and obtain some intriguing findings. The KoLA dataset and open-participation leaderboard are publicly released at https://kola.xlore.cn and will be continuously updated to provide references for developing LLMs and knowledge-related systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

ChatLog: Carefully Evaluating the Evolution of ChatGPT Across Time

ChatGPT has achieved great success and can be considered to have acquired an infrastructural status. There are abundant works for evaluating ChatGPT on benchmarks. However, existing benchmarks encounter two challenges: (1) Disregard for periodical evaluation and (2) Lack of fine-grained features. In this paper, we construct ChatLog, an ever-updating dataset with large-scale records of diverse long-form ChatGPT responses for 21 NLP benchmarks from March, 2023 to now. We conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation to find that most capabilities of ChatGPT improve over time except for some abilities, and there exists a step-wise evolving pattern of ChatGPT. We further analyze the inherent characteristics of ChatGPT by extracting the knowledge and linguistic features. We find some stable features that stay unchanged and apply them on the detection of ChatGPT-generated texts to improve the robustness of cross-version detection. We will continuously maintain our project at \url{https://github.com/THU-KEG/ChatLog/}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

MAVEN-Arg: Completing the Puzzle of All-in-One Event Understanding Dataset with Event Argument Annotation

Understanding events in texts is a core objective of natural language understanding, which requires detecting event occurrences, extracting event arguments, and analyzing inter-event relationships. However, due to the annotation challenges brought by task complexity, a large-scale dataset covering the full process of event understanding has long been absent. In this paper, we introduce MAVEN-Arg, which augments MAVEN datasets with event argument annotations, making the first all-in-one dataset supporting event detection, event argument extraction (EAE), and event relation extraction. As an EAE benchmark, MAVEN-Arg offers three main advantages: (1) a comprehensive schema covering 162 event types and 612 argument roles, all with expert-written definitions and examples; (2) a large data scale, containing 98,591 events and 290,613 arguments obtained with laborious human annotation; (3) the exhaustive annotation supporting all task variants of EAE, which annotates both entity and non-entity event arguments in document level. Experiments indicate that MAVEN-Arg is quite challenging for both fine-tuned EAE models and proprietary large language models (LLMs). Furthermore, to demonstrate the benefits of an all-in-one dataset, we preliminarily explore a potential application, future event prediction, with LLMs. MAVEN-Arg and codes can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/MAVEN-Argument.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

R-Eval: A Unified Toolkit for Evaluating Domain Knowledge of Retrieval Augmented Large Language Models

Large language models have achieved remarkable success on general NLP tasks, but they may fall short for domain-specific problems. Recently, various Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (RALLMs) are proposed to address this shortcoming. However, existing evaluation tools only provide a few baselines and evaluate them on various domains without mining the depth of domain knowledge. In this paper, we address the challenges of evaluating RALLMs by introducing the R-Eval toolkit, a Python toolkit designed to streamline the evaluation of different RAG workflows in conjunction with LLMs. Our toolkit, which supports popular built-in RAG workflows and allows for the incorporation of customized testing data on the specific domain, is designed to be user-friendly, modular, and extensible. We conduct an evaluation of 21 RALLMs across three task levels and two representative domains, revealing significant variations in the effectiveness of RALLMs across different tasks and domains. Our analysis emphasizes the importance of considering both task and domain requirements when choosing a RAG workflow and LLM combination. We are committed to continuously maintaining our platform at https://github.com/THU-KEG/R-Eval to facilitate both the industry and the researchers.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Finding and Editing Multi-Modal Neurons in Pre-Trained Transformers

Understanding the internal mechanisms by which multi-modal large language models (LLMs) interpret different modalities and integrate cross-modal representations is becoming increasingly critical for continuous improvements in both academia and industry. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify key neurons for interpretability -- how multi-modal LLMs bridge visual and textual concepts for captioning. Our method improves conventional works upon efficiency and applied range by removing needs of costly gradient computation. Based on those identified neurons, we further design a multi-modal knowledge editing method, beneficial to mitigate sensitive words or hallucination. For rationale of our design, we provide theoretical assumption. For empirical evaluation, we have conducted extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments. The results not only validate the effectiveness of our methods, but also offer insightful findings that highlight three key properties of multi-modal neurons: sensitivity, specificity and causal-effect, to shed light for future research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Event GDR: Event-Centric Generative Document Retrieval

Generative document retrieval, an emerging paradigm in information retrieval, learns to build connections between documents and identifiers within a single model, garnering significant attention. However, there are still two challenges: (1) neglecting inner-content correlation during document representation; (2) lacking explicit semantic structure during identifier construction. Nonetheless, events have enriched relations and well-defined taxonomy, which could facilitate addressing the above two challenges. Inspired by this, we propose Event GDR, an event-centric generative document retrieval model, integrating event knowledge into this task. Specifically, we utilize an exchange-then-reflection method based on multi-agents for event knowledge extraction. For document representation, we employ events and relations to model the document to guarantee the comprehensiveness and inner-content correlation. For identifier construction, we map the events to well-defined event taxonomy to construct the identifiers with explicit semantic structure. Our method achieves significant improvement over the baselines on two datasets, and also hopes to provide insights for future research.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

TacoERE: Cluster-aware Compression for Event Relation Extraction

Event relation extraction (ERE) is a critical and fundamental challenge for natural language processing. Existing work mainly focuses on directly modeling the entire document, which cannot effectively handle long-range dependencies and information redundancy. To address these issues, we propose a cluster-aware compression method for improving event relation extraction (TacoERE), which explores a compression-then-extraction paradigm. Specifically, we first introduce document clustering for modeling event dependencies. It splits the document into intra- and inter-clusters, where intra-clusters aim to enhance the relations within the same cluster, while inter-clusters attempt to model the related events at arbitrary distances. Secondly, we utilize cluster summarization to simplify and highlight important text content of clusters for mitigating information redundancy and event distance. We have conducted extensive experiments on both pre-trained language models, such as RoBERTa, and large language models, such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, on three ERE datasets, i.e., MAVEN-ERE, EventStoryLine and HiEve. Experimental results demonstrate that TacoERE is an effective method for ERE.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Event-level Knowledge Editing

Knowledge editing aims at updating knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to prevent them from becoming outdated. Existing work edits LLMs at the level of factual knowledge triplets. However, natural knowledge updates in the real world come from the occurrences of new events rather than direct changes in factual triplets. In this paper, we propose a new task setting: event-level knowledge editing, which directly edits new events into LLMs and improves over conventional triplet-level editing on (1) Efficiency. A single event edit leads to updates in multiple entailed knowledge triplets. (2) Completeness. Beyond updating factual knowledge, event-level editing also requires considering the event influences and updating LLMs' knowledge about future trends. We construct a high-quality event-level editing benchmark ELKEN, consisting of 1,515 event edits, 6,449 questions about factual knowledge, and 10,150 questions about future tendencies. We systematically evaluate the performance of various knowledge editing methods and LLMs on this benchmark. We find that ELKEN poses significant challenges to existing knowledge editing approaches. Our codes and dataset are publicly released to facilitate further research.

cs.CL↗