Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive emergent abilities in a wide range of tasks, but still face challenges in handling complex reasoning problems. Previous works like chain-of-thought (CoT) and tree-of-thoughts (ToT) have predominately focused on enhancing accuracy, but overlook the rapidly increasing token cost, which could be particularly problematic for open-ended real-world tasks with huge solution spaces. Motivated by the dual process theory of human cognition, we propose "Synergy of Thoughts" (SoT) to unleash the synergistic potential of hybrid LLMs for efficient reasoning. By default, SoT uses smaller-scale language models to generate multiple low-cost reasoning thoughts, which resembles the parallel intuitions produced by System 1. If these intuitions exhibit conflicts, SoT will invoke the reflective reasoning of scaled-up language models to emulate the intervention of System 2, which will override the intuitive thoughts and rectify the reasoning process. This framework is model-agnostic and training-free, which can be flexibly implemented with various off-the-shelf LLMs. Experiments on six representative reasoning tasks show that SoT substantially reduces the token cost by 38.3%-75.1%, and simultaneously achieves state-of-the-art reasoning accuracy and solution diversity. Notably, the average token cost reduction on open-ended tasks reaches up to 69.1%. Code repo with all prompts will be released upon publication.
Large language models (LLMs) present a valuable technology for various applications in healthcare, but their tendency to hallucinate introduces unacceptable uncertainty in critical decision-making situations. Human-AI collaboration (HAIC) can mitigate this uncertainty by combining human and AI strengths for better outcomes. This paper presents a novel guided deferral system that provides intelligent guidance when AI defers cases to human decision-makers. We leverage LLMs' verbalisation capabilities and internal states to create this system, demonstrating that fine-tuning small-scale LLMs with data from large-scale LLMs greatly enhances performance while maintaining computational efficiency and data privacy. A pilot study showcases the effectiveness of our proposed deferral system.
Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) is effective at significantly improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on downstream tasks such as reasoning, summarisation, and alignment. Using pairs of preferred and dispreferred data, DPO models the relative probability of picking one response over another. In this work, first we show theoretically that the standard DPO loss can lead to a reduction of the model's likelihood of the preferred examples, as long as the relative probability between the preferred and dispreferred classes increases. We then show empirically that this phenomenon occurs when fine-tuning LLMs on common datasets, especially datasets in which the edit distance between pairs of completions is low. Using these insights, we design DPO-Positive (DPOP), a new loss function and training procedure which avoids this failure mode. Surprisingly, we find that DPOP outperforms DPO and other fine-tuning procedures across a wide variety of datasets and downstream tasks, including datasets with high edit distances between completions. Furthermore, we find that the DPOP-tuned model outperforms the DPO-tuned model (all else equal) on benchmarks independent of the fine-tuning data, such as MT-Bench. Finally, using DPOP, we create and open-source Smaug-34B and Smaug-72B, with the latter becoming the first open-source LLM to surpass an average accuracy of 80% on the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard.
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive success across several fields, but their proficiency in understanding and resolving complex graph problems is less explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce GraphInstruct, a novel and comprehensive instruction-tuning dataset designed to equip language models with the ability to tackle a broad spectrum of graph problems using explicit reasoning paths. Utilizing GraphInstruct, we build GraphWiz, an open-source language model capable of resolving various graph problem types while generating clear reasoning processes. To enhance the model's capability and reliability, we incorporate the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) framework into the graph problem-solving context. The enhanced model, GraphWiz-DPO, achieves an average accuracy of 65% across nine tasks with different complexity levels, surpassing GPT-4 which has an average accuracy of 43.8%. Moreover, our research delves into the delicate balance between training data volume and model performance, highlighting the potential for overfitting with increased data. We also explore the transferability of the model's reasoning ability across different graph tasks, indicating the model's adaptability and practical application potential. Our investigation offers a new blueprint and valuable insights for developing LLMs specialized in graph reasoning and problem-solving.
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various NLP tasks, yet their potential in more challenging and domain-specific task, such as finance, has not been fully explored. In this paper, we present CFinBench: a meticulously crafted, the most comprehensive evaluation benchmark to date, for assessing the financial knowledge of LLMs under Chinese context. In practice, to better align with the career trajectory of Chinese financial practitioners, we build a systematic evaluation from 4 first-level categories: (1) Financial Subject: whether LLMs can memorize the necessary basic knowledge of financial subjects, such as economics, statistics and auditing. (2) Financial Qualification: whether LLMs can obtain the needed financial qualified certifications, such as certified public accountant, securities qualification and banking qualification. (3) Financial Practice: whether LLMs can fulfill the practical financial jobs, such as tax consultant, junior accountant and securities analyst. (4) Financial Law: whether LLMs can meet the requirement of financial laws and regulations, such as tax law, insurance law and economic law. CFinBench comprises 99,100 questions spanning 43 second-level categories with 3 question types: single-choice, multiple-choice and judgment. We conduct extensive experiments of 50 representative LLMs with various model size on CFinBench. The results show that GPT4 and some Chinese-oriented models lead the benchmark, with the highest average accuracy being 60.16%, highlighting the challenge presented by CFinBench. The dataset and evaluation code are available at //cfinbench.github.io/.
Large language models (LLMs) have brought a paradigm shift to the field of code generation, offering the potential to enhance the software development process. However, previous research mainly focuses on the accuracy of code generation, while coding style differences between LLMs and human developers remain under-explored. In this paper, we empirically analyze the differences in coding style between the code generated by mainstream Code LLMs and the code written by human developers, and summarize coding style inconsistency taxonomy. Specifically, we first summarize the types of coding style inconsistencies by manually analyzing a large number of generation results. We then compare the code generated by Code LLMs with the code written by human programmers in terms of readability, conciseness, and robustness. The results reveal that LLMs and developers have different coding styles. Additionally, we study the possible causes of these inconsistencies and provide some solutions to alleviate the problem.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where "prompt'' plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: 1) temporal lag of training data, and 2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power of LLMs for downstream tasks, but a lack of systematic literature and standardized terminology, partly due to the rapid evolution of this field. Therefore, in this work, we survey related prompting tools and promote the concept of the "Prompting Framework" (PF), i.e. the framework for managing, simplifying, and facilitating interaction with large language models. We define the lifecycle of the PF as a hierarchical structure, from bottom to top, namely: Data Level, Base Level, Execute Level, and Service Level. We also systematically depict the overall landscape of the emerging PF field and discuss potential future research and challenges. To continuously track the developments in this area, we maintain a repository at //github.com/lxx0628/Prompting-Framework-Survey, which can be a useful resource sharing platform for both academic and industry in this field.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing. However, their internal mechanisms are still unclear and this lack of transparency poses unwanted risks for downstream applications. Therefore, understanding and explaining these models is crucial for elucidating their behaviors, limitations, and social impacts. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy of explainability techniques and provide a structured overview of methods for explaining Transformer-based language models. We categorize techniques based on the training paradigms of LLMs: traditional fine-tuning-based paradigm and prompting-based paradigm. For each paradigm, we summarize the goals and dominant approaches for generating local explanations of individual predictions and global explanations of overall model knowledge. We also discuss metrics for evaluating generated explanations, and discuss how explanations can be leveraged to debug models and improve performance. Lastly, we examine key challenges and emerging opportunities for explanation techniques in the era of LLMs in comparison to conventional machine learning models.
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been the de facto paradigm for most natural language processing (NLP) tasks. This also benefits biomedical domain: researchers from informatics, medicine, and computer science (CS) communities propose various PLMs trained on biomedical datasets, e.g., biomedical text, electronic health records, protein, and DNA sequences for various biomedical tasks. However, the cross-discipline characteristics of biomedical PLMs hinder their spreading among communities; some existing works are isolated from each other without comprehensive comparison and discussions. It expects a survey that not only systematically reviews recent advances of biomedical PLMs and their applications but also standardizes terminology and benchmarks. In this paper, we summarize the recent progress of pre-trained language models in the biomedical domain and their applications in biomedical downstream tasks. Particularly, we discuss the motivations and propose a taxonomy of existing biomedical PLMs. Their applications in biomedical downstream tasks are exhaustively discussed. At last, we illustrate various limitations and future trends, which we hope can provide inspiration for the future research of the research community.
Knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models (K-PLMs) are shown to be effective for many public tasks in the literature but few of them have been successfully applied in practice. To address this problem, we propose K-AID, a systematic approach that includes a low-cost knowledge acquisition process for acquiring domain knowledge, an effective knowledge infusion module for improving model performance, and a knowledge distillation component for reducing the model size and deploying K-PLMs on resource-restricted devices (e.g., CPU) for real-world application. Importantly, instead of capturing entity knowledge like the majority of existing K-PLMs, our approach captures relational knowledge, which contributes to better-improving sentence-level text classification and text matching tasks that play a key role in question answering (QA). We conducted a set of experiments on five text classification tasks and three text matching tasks from three domains, namely E-commerce, Government, and Film&TV, and performed online A/B tests in E-commerce. Experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve substantial improvement on sentence-level question answering tasks and bring beneficial business value in industrial settings.
Transformer-based pretrained language models (T-PTLMs) have achieved great success in almost every NLP task. The evolution of these models started with GPT and BERT. These models are built on the top of transformers, self-supervised learning and transfer learning. Transformed-based PTLMs learn universal language representations from large volumes of text data using self-supervised learning and transfer this knowledge to downstream tasks. These models provide good background knowledge to downstream tasks which avoids training of downstream models from scratch. In this comprehensive survey paper, we initially give a brief overview of self-supervised learning. Next, we explain various core concepts like pretraining, pretraining methods, pretraining tasks, embeddings and downstream adaptation methods. Next, we present a new taxonomy of T-PTLMs and then give brief overview of various benchmarks including both intrinsic and extrinsic. We present a summary of various useful libraries to work with T-PTLMs. Finally, we highlight some of the future research directions which will further improve these models. We strongly believe that this comprehensive survey paper will serve as a good reference to learn the core concepts as well as to stay updated with the recent happenings in T-PTLMs.