arXiv subjects

Yongbin Li

Publications and source records attributed to Yongbin Li.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

FlowBench: Revisiting and Benchmarking Workflow-Guided Planning for LLM-based Agents

LLM-based agents have emerged as promising tools, which are crafted to fulfill complex tasks by iterative planning and action. However, these agents are susceptible to undesired planning hallucinations when lacking specific knowledge for expertise-intensive tasks. To address this, preliminary attempts are made to enhance planning reliability by incorporating external workflow-related knowledge. Despite the promise, such infused knowledge is mostly disorganized and diverse in formats, lacking rigorous formalization and comprehensive comparisons. Motivated by this, we formalize different formats of workflow knowledge and present FlowBench, the first benchmark for workflow-guided planning. FlowBench covers 51 different scenarios from 6 domains, with knowledge presented in diverse formats. To assess different LLMs on FlowBench, we design a multi-tiered evaluation framework. We evaluate the efficacy of workflow knowledge across multiple formats, and the results indicate that current LLM agents need considerable improvements for satisfactory planning. We hope that our challenging benchmark can pave the way for future agent planning research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Language Models are Super Mario: Absorbing Abilities from Homologous Models as a Free Lunch

In this paper, we unveil that Language Models (LMs) can acquire new capabilities by assimilating parameters from homologous models without retraining or GPUs. We first introduce DARE to set most delta parameters (i.e., the disparity between fine-tuned and pre-trained parameters) to zeros without affecting the abilities of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) LMs, which randomly Drops delta parameters with a ratio $p$ And REscales the remaining ones by $1 / (1 - p)$ to approximate the original embeddings. Then, we use DARE as a versatile plug-in to sparsify delta parameters of multiple SFT homologous models for mitigating parameter interference and merge them into a single model by parameter fusing. We experiment with encoder- and decoder-based LMs, showing that: (1) SFT delta parameter value ranges are typically small (within 0.002) with extreme redundancy, and DARE can effortlessly eliminate 90% or even 99% of them; (2) DARE can merge multiple task-specific LMs into one LM with diverse capabilities. Notably, this phenomenon is more pronounced in large-scale LMs, where the merged LM reveals the potential to surpass the performance of any source LM, providing a new discovery. We also utilize DARE to create a merged LM that ranks first among models with 7 billion parameters on the Open LLM Leaderboard.

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arXiv2024

How Alignment and Jailbreak Work: Explain LLM Safety through Intermediate Hidden States

Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid responding to malicious user inputs. Unfortunately, jailbreak can circumvent safety guardrails, resulting in LLMs generating harmful content and raising concerns about LLM safety. Due to language models with intensive parameters often regarded as black boxes, the mechanisms of alignment and jailbreak are challenging to elucidate. In this paper, we employ weak classifiers to explain LLM safety through the intermediate hidden states. We first confirm that LLMs learn ethical concepts during pre-training rather than alignment and can identify malicious and normal inputs in the early layers. Alignment actually associates the early concepts with emotion guesses in the middle layers and then refines them to the specific reject tokens for safe generations. Jailbreak disturbs the transformation of early unethical classification into negative emotions. We conduct experiments on models from 7B to 70B across various model families to prove our conclusion. Overall, our paper indicates the intrinsical mechanism of LLM safety and how jailbreaks circumvent safety guardrails, offering a new perspective on LLM safety and reducing concerns. Our code is available at https://github.com/ydyjya/LLM-IHS-Explanation.

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arXiv2024

Iterative Forward Tuning Boosts In-Context Learning in Language Models

Despite the advancements in in-context learning (ICL) for large language models (LLMs), current research centers on specific prompt engineering, such as demonstration selection, with the expectation that a single iteration of demonstrations processing can generalize effectively to a given test sample. However, this perspective overlooks the potential benefits derived from multiple iterations involving demonstrations, a practice aligning more closely with the iterative decision-making process exhibited by humans, who often learn through analogy. In this study, we introduce a novel two-stage framework to boost ICL in LLMs. Specifically, our framework delineates the ICL process into two distinct stages: Deep-Thinking and test stages. The Deep-Thinking stage incorporates a unique attention mechanism, i.e., iterative enhanced attention, which enables multiple rounds of information accumulation. This mechanism operates by manipulating the Key-Value matrices without training, fostering enhanced understanding capabilities in LLMs by thinking demonstrations multiple times. We evaluated Deep-Thinking across a range of benchmarks and LLMs, showing its superior performance over vanilla ICL methods and its effectiveness in challenging tasks where demonstration selection is infeasible.

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arXiv2024

Fortify the Shortest Stave in Attention: Enhancing Context Awareness of Large Language Models for Effective Tool Use

In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing LLMs for tool-use. Specifically, the crucial information in the context will be potentially overlooked by model when it is positioned in the trough zone of the attention waveform, leading to decreased performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel inference method named Attention Buckets. It allows LLMs to process their input through multiple parallel processes. Each process utilizes a distinct base angle for the rotary position embedding, thereby creating a unique attention waveform. By compensating an attention trough of a particular process with an attention peak of another process, our approach enhances LLM's awareness to various contextual positions, thus mitigating the risk of overlooking crucial information. In the largest tool-use benchmark, our method elevates a 7B model to achieve state-of-the-art performance, comparable to that of GPT-4. On other benchmarks and some RAG tasks, which also demand a thorough understanding of contextual content, Attention Buckets also exhibited notable enhancements in performance.

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arXiv2024

One-Shot Learning as Instruction Data Prospector for Large Language Models

Contemporary practices in instruction tuning often hinge on enlarging data scaling without a clear strategy for ensuring data quality, inadvertently introducing noise that may compromise model performance. To address this challenge, we introduce \textsc{Nuggets}, a novel and efficient methodology that leverages one-shot learning to discern and select high-quality instruction data from extensive datasets. \textsc{Nuggets} assesses the potential of individual instruction examples to act as effective one-shot learning instances, thereby identifying those that can significantly improve performance across diverse tasks. \textsc{Nuggets} utilizes a scoring system based on the impact of candidate examples on the perplexity of a diverse anchor set, facilitating the selection of the most advantageous data for instruction tuning. Through comprehensive evaluations on two benchmarks, including MT-Bench and Alpaca-Eval, we show that instruction tuning with the top 1\% of examples curated by \textsc{Nuggets} substantially outperforms conventional methods employing the entire dataset.

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arXiv2024

A Survey on Self-Evolution of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced in various fields and intelligent agent applications. However, current LLMs that learn from human or external model supervision are costly and may face performance ceilings as task complexity and diversity increase. To address this issue, self-evolution approaches that enable LLM to autonomously acquire, refine, and learn from experiences generated by the model itself are rapidly growing. This new training paradigm inspired by the human experiential learning process offers the potential to scale LLMs towards superintelligence. In this work, we present a comprehensive survey of self-evolution approaches in LLMs. We first propose a conceptual framework for self-evolution and outline the evolving process as iterative cycles composed of four phases: experience acquisition, experience refinement, updating, and evaluation. Second, we categorize the evolution objectives of LLMs and LLM-based agents; then, we summarize the literature and provide taxonomy and insights for each module. Lastly, we pinpoint existing challenges and propose future directions to improve self-evolution frameworks, equipping researchers with critical insights to fast-track the development of self-evolving LLMs. Our corresponding GitHub repository is available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/Awesome-Self-Evolution-of-LLM

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arXiv2024

DevEval: A Manually-Annotated Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositories

How to evaluate the coding abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains an open question. We find that existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with real-world code repositories and are insufficient to evaluate the coding abilities of LLMs. To address the knowledge gap, we propose a new benchmark named DevEval, which has three advances. (1) DevEval aligns with real-world repositories in multiple dimensions, e.g., code distributions and dependency distributions. (2) DevEval is annotated by 13 developers and contains comprehensive annotations (e.g., requirements, original repositories, reference code, and reference dependencies). (3) DevEval comprises 1,874 testing samples from 117 repositories, covering 10 popular domains (e.g., Internet, Database). Based on DevEval, we propose repository-level code generation and evaluate 8 popular LLMs on DevEval (e.g., gpt-4, gpt-3.5, StarCoder 2, DeepSeek Coder, CodeLLaMa). Our experiments reveal these LLMs' coding abilities in real-world code repositories. For example, in our experiments, the highest Pass@1 of gpt-4-turbo is only 53.04%. We also analyze LLMs' failed cases and summarize their shortcomings. We hope DevEval can facilitate the development of LLMs in real code repositories. DevEval, prompts, and LLMs' predictions have been released.

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arXiv2024

Aligning Logits Generatively for Principled Black-Box Knowledge Distillation

Black-Box Knowledge Distillation (B2KD) is a formulated problem for cloud-to-edge model compression with invisible data and models hosted on the server. B2KD faces challenges such as limited Internet exchange and edge-cloud disparity of data distributions. In this paper, we formalize a two-step workflow consisting of deprivatization and distillation, and theoretically provide a new optimization direction from logits to cell boundary different from direct logits alignment. With its guidance, we propose a new method Mapping-Emulation KD (MEKD) that distills a black-box cumbersome model into a lightweight one. Our method does not differentiate between treating soft or hard responses, and consists of: 1) deprivatization: emulating the inverse mapping of the teacher function with a generator, and 2) distillation: aligning low-dimensional logits of the teacher and student models by reducing the distance of high-dimensional image points. For different teacher-student pairs, our method yields inspiring distillation performance on various benchmarks, and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art approaches.

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arXiv2024

Scaling Data Diversity for Fine-Tuning Language Models in Human Alignment

Alignment with human preference prevents large language models (LLMs) from generating misleading or toxic content while requiring high-cost human feedback. Assuming resources of human annotation are limited, there are two different ways of allocating considered: more diverse PROMPTS or more diverse RESPONSES to be labeled. Nonetheless, a straightforward comparison between their impact is absent. In this work, we first control the diversity of both sides according to the number of samples for fine-tuning, which can directly reflect their influence. We find that instead of numerous prompts, more responses but fewer prompts better trigger LLMs for human alignment. Additionally, the concept of diversity for prompts can be more complex than responses that are typically quantified by single digits. Consequently, a new formulation of prompt diversity is proposed, further implying a linear correlation with the final performance of LLMs after fine-tuning. We also leverage it on data augmentation and conduct experiments to show its effect on different algorithms.

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arXiv2024

Enhancing the General Agent Capabilities of Low-Parameter LLMs through Tuning and Multi-Branch Reasoning

Open-source pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong language understanding and generation capabilities, making them highly successful in a variety of tasks. However, when used as agents for dealing with complex problems in the real world, their performance is far inferior to large commercial models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. As intelligent agents, LLMs need to have the capabilities of task planning, long-term memory, and the ability to leverage external tools to achieve satisfactory performance. Various methods have been proposed to enhance the agent capabilities of LLMs. On the one hand, methods involve constructing agent-specific data and fine-tuning the models. On the other hand, some methods focus on designing prompts that effectively activate the reasoning abilities of the LLMs. We explore both strategies on the 7B and 13B models. We propose a comprehensive method for constructing agent-specific data using GPT-4. Through supervised fine-tuning with constructed data, we find that for these models with a relatively small number of parameters, supervised fine-tuning can significantly reduce hallucination outputs and formatting errors in agent tasks. Furthermore, techniques such as multi-path reasoning and task decomposition can effectively decrease problem complexity and enhance the performance of LLMs as agents. We evaluate our method on five agent tasks of AgentBench and achieve satisfactory results.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Fine-Tuning Language Models with Reward Learning on Policy

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an effective approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. RLHF contains three steps, i.e., human preference collecting, reward learning, and policy optimization, which are usually performed serially. Despite its popularity, however, (fixed) reward models may suffer from inaccurate off-distribution, since policy optimization continuously shifts LLMs' data distribution. Repeatedly collecting new preference data from the latest LLMs may alleviate this issue, which unfortunately makes the resulting system more complicated and difficult to optimize. In this paper, we propose reward learning on policy (RLP), an unsupervised framework that refines a reward model using policy samples to keep it on-distribution. Specifically, an unsupervised multi-view learning method is introduced to learn robust representations of policy samples. Meanwhile, a synthetic preference generation approach is developed to simulate high-quality preference data with policy outputs. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that RLP consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/rlp}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

A Preliminary Study of the Intrinsic Relationship between Complexity and Alignment

Training large language models (LLMs) with open-domain instruction data has yielded remarkable success in aligning to end tasks and human preferences. Extensive research has highlighted the importance of the quality and diversity of instruction data. However, the impact of data complexity, as a crucial metric, remains relatively unexplored from three aspects: (1)where the sustainability of performance improvements with increasing complexity is uncertain; (2)whether the improvement brought by complexity merely comes from introducing more training tokens; and (3)where the potential benefits of incorporating instructions from easy to difficult are not yet fully understood. In this paper, we propose Tree-Instruct to systematically enhance the instruction complexity in a controllable manner. By adding a specified number of nodes to instructions' semantic trees, this approach not only yields new instruction data from the modified tree but also allows us to control the difficulty level of modified instructions. Our preliminary experiments reveal the following insights: (1)Increasing complexity consistently leads to sustained performance improvements of LLMs. (2)Under the same token budget, a few complex instructions outperform diverse yet simple instructions. (3)Curriculum instruction tuning might not yield the anticipated results; focusing on increasing complexity appears to be the key.

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arXiv2024

Preference Ranking Optimization for Human Alignment

Large language models (LLMs) often contain misleading content, emphasizing the need to align them with human values to ensure secure AI systems. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been employed to achieve this alignment. However, it encompasses two main drawbacks: (1) RLHF exhibits complexity, instability, and sensitivity to hyperparameters in contrast to SFT. (2) Despite massive trial-and-error, multiple sampling is reduced to pair-wise contrast, thus lacking contrasts from a macro perspective. In this paper, we propose Preference Ranking Optimization (PRO) as an efficient SFT algorithm to directly fine-tune LLMs for human alignment. PRO extends the pair-wise contrast to accommodate preference rankings of any length. By iteratively contrasting candidates, PRO instructs the LLM to prioritize the best response while progressively ranking the rest responses. In this manner, PRO effectively transforms human alignment into aligning the probability ranking of n responses generated by LLM with the preference ranking of humans towards these responses. Experiments have shown that PRO outperforms baseline algorithms, achieving comparable results to ChatGPT and human responses through automatic-based, reward-based, GPT-4, and human evaluations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

SoFA: Shielded On-the-fly Alignment via Priority Rule Following

The alignment problem in Large Language Models (LLMs) involves adapting them to the broad spectrum of human values. This requirement challenges existing alignment methods due to diversity of preferences and regulatory standards. This paper introduces a novel alignment paradigm, priority rule following, which defines rules as the primary control mechanism in each dialog, prioritizing them over user instructions. Our preliminary analysis reveals that even the advanced LLMs, such as GPT-4, exhibit shortcomings in understanding and prioritizing the rules. Therefore, we present PriorityDistill, a semi-automated approach for distilling priority following signals from LLM simulations to ensure robust rule integration and adherence. Our experiments show that this method not only effectively minimizes misalignments utilizing only one general rule but also adapts smoothly to various unseen rules, ensuring they are shielded from hijacking and that the model responds appropriately.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Out-of-Domain Intent Detection Considering Multi-Turn Dialogue Contexts

Out-of-Domain (OOD) intent detection is vital for practical dialogue systems, and it usually requires considering multi-turn dialogue contexts. However, most previous OOD intent detection approaches are limited to single dialogue turns. In this paper, we introduce a context-aware OOD intent detection (Caro) framework to model multi-turn contexts in OOD intent detection tasks. Specifically, we follow the information bottleneck principle to extract robust representations from multi-turn dialogue contexts. Two different views are constructed for each input sample and the superfluous information not related to intent detection is removed using a multi-view information bottleneck loss. Moreover, we also explore utilizing unlabeled data in Caro. A two-stage training process is introduced to mine OOD samples from these unlabeled data, and these OOD samples are used to train the resulting model with a bootstrapping approach. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Caro establishes state-of-the-art performances on multi-turn OOD detection tasks by improving the F1-OOD score of over $29\%$ compared to the previous best method.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

DialCLIP: Empowering CLIP as Multi-Modal Dialog Retriever

Recently, substantial advancements in pre-trained vision-language models have greatly enhanced the capabilities of multi-modal dialog systems. These models have demonstrated significant improvements by fine-tuning on downstream tasks. However, the existing pre-trained models primarily focus on effectively capturing the alignment between vision and language modalities, often ignoring the intricate nature of dialog context. In this paper, we propose a parameter-efficient prompt-tuning method named DialCLIP for multi-modal dialog retrieval. Specifically, our approach introduces a multi-modal context prompt generator to learn context features which are subsequently distilled into prompts within the pre-trained vision-language model CLIP. Besides, we introduce domain prompt to mitigate the disc repancy from the downstream dialog data. To facilitate various types of retrieval, we also design multiple experts to learn mappings from CLIP outputs to multi-modal representation space, with each expert being responsible to one specific retrieval type. Extensive experiments show that DialCLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely recognized benchmark datasets (i.e., PhotoChat and MMDialog) by tuning a mere 0.04% of the total parameters. These results highlight the efficacy and efficiency of our proposed approach, underscoring its potential to advance the field of multi-modal dialog retrieval.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Unifying Structured Data as Graph for Data-to-Text Pre-Training

Data-to-text (D2T) generation aims to transform structured data into natural language text. Data-to-text pre-training has proved to be powerful in enhancing D2T generation and yields impressive performances. However, previous pre-training methods either oversimplified structured data into a sequence without considering input structures or designed training objectives tailored for a specific data structure (e.g., table or knowledge graph). In this paper, we unify different types of structured data (i.e., table, key-value data, knowledge graph) into the graph format and cast different data-to-text generation tasks as graph-to-text generation. To effectively exploit the structural information of the input graph, we propose a structure-enhanced pre-training method for D2T generation by designing a structure-enhanced Transformer. Concretely, we devise a position matrix for the Transformer, encoding relative positional information of connected nodes in the input graph. In addition, we propose a new attention matrix to incorporate graph structures into the original Transformer by taking the available explicit connectivity structure into account. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our model. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/unid2t.

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