Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution for collaborative training of large language models (LLMs). However, the integration of LLMs into FL introduces new challenges, particularly concerning the evaluation of LLMs. Traditional evaluation methods that rely on labeled test sets and similarity-based metrics cover only a subset of the acceptable answers, thereby failing to accurately reflect the performance of LLMs on generative tasks. Meanwhile, although automatic evaluation methods that leverage advanced LLMs present potential, they face critical risks of data leakage due to the need to transmit data to external servers and suboptimal performance on downstream tasks due to the lack of domain knowledge. To address these issues, we propose a Federated Evaluation framework of Large Language Models, named FedEval-LLM, that provides reliable performance measurements of LLMs on downstream tasks without the reliance on labeled test sets and external tools, thus ensuring strong privacy-preserving capability. FedEval-LLM leverages a consortium of personalized LLMs from participants as referees to provide domain knowledge and collective evaluation capability, thus aligning to the respective downstream tasks and mitigating uncertainties and biases associated with a single referee. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in the evaluation capability of personalized evaluation models on downstream tasks. When applied to FL, these evaluation models exhibit strong agreement with human preference and RougeL-score on meticulously curated test sets. FedEval-LLM effectively overcomes the limitations of traditional metrics and the reliance on external services, making it a promising framework for the evaluation of LLMs within collaborative training scenarios.
Compressing high-capability Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a favored strategy for resource-efficient inferences. While state-of-the-art (SoTA) compression methods boast impressive advancements in preserving benign task performance, the potential risks of compression in terms of safety and trustworthiness have been largely neglected. This study conducts the first, thorough evaluation of three (3) leading LLMs using five (5) SoTA compression techniques across eight (8) trustworthiness dimensions. Our experiments highlight the intricate interplay between compression and trustworthiness, revealing some interesting patterns. We find that quantization is currently a more effective approach than pruning in achieving efficiency and trustworthiness simultaneously. For instance, a 4-bit quantized model retains the trustworthiness of its original counterpart, but model pruning significantly degrades trustworthiness, even at 50% sparsity. Moreover, employing quantization within a moderate bit range could unexpectedly improve certain trustworthiness dimensions such as ethics and fairness. Conversely, extreme quantization to very low bit levels (3 bits) tends to reduce trustworthiness significantly. This increased risk cannot be uncovered by looking at benign performance alone, in turn, mandating comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation in practice. These findings culminate in practical recommendations for simultaneously achieving high utility, efficiency, and trustworthiness in LLMs. Code and models are available at //decoding-comp-trust.github.io.
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) is a challenging task of detecting objects and predicting relationships between objects. After DETR was developed, one-stage SGG models based on a one-stage object detector have been actively studied. However, complex modeling is used to predict the relationship between objects, and the inherent relationship between object queries learned in the multi-head self-attention of the object detector has been neglected. We propose a lightweight one-stage SGG model that extracts the relation graph from the various relationships learned in the multi-head self-attention layers of the DETR decoder. By fully utilizing the self-attention by-products, the relation graph can be extracted effectively with a shallow relation extraction head. Considering the dependency of the relation extraction task on the object detection task, we propose a novel relation smoothing technique that adjusts the relation label adaptively according to the quality of the detected objects. By the relation smoothing, the model is trained according to the continuous curriculum that focuses on object detection task at the beginning of training and performs multi-task learning as the object detection performance gradually improves. Furthermore, we propose a connectivity prediction task that predicts whether a relation exists between object pairs as an auxiliary task of the relation extraction. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method for the Visual Genome and Open Image V6 datasets. Our code is publicly available at //github.com/naver-ai/egtr.
As AI systems pervade human life, ensuring that large language models (LLMs) make safe decisions is a significant challenge. This paper introduces the Governance of the Commons Simulation (GovSim), a generative simulation platform designed to study strategic interactions and cooperative decision-making in LLMs. Using GovSim, we investigate the dynamics of sustainable resource sharing in a society of AI agents. This environment allows us to study the influence of ethical considerations, strategic planning, and negotiation skills on cooperative outcomes for AI agents. We develop an LLM-based agent architecture designed for these social dilemmas and test it with a variety of LLMs. We find that all but the most powerful LLM agents fail to achieve a sustainable equilibrium in GovSim. Ablations reveal that successful multi-agent communication between agents is critical for achieving cooperation in these cases. Furthermore, our analyses show that the failure to achieve sustainable cooperation in most LLMs stems from their inability to formulate and analyze hypotheses about the long-term effects of their actions on the equilibrium of the group. Finally, we show that agents that leverage ``Universalization''-based reasoning, a theory of moral thinking, are able to achieve significantly greater sustainability. Taken together, GovSim enables us to study the mechanisms that underlie sustainable self-government with significant specificity and scale. We open source the full suite of our research results, including the simulation environment, agent prompts, and a comprehensive web interface.
Scaled Dot Product Attention (SDPA) is the backbone of many modern deep-learning models. It is so versatile that it has been used in natural language, vision, and multi-modal domains with very little change compared to its original formulation. This paper discusses why the current formulation is inefficient by delving into the mathematical details of the attention mechanism. We propose three improvements to mitigate these inefficiencies, thereby, introducing three enhanced attention mechanisms: Optimised, Efficient, and Super Attention. Optimised and Efficient Attention have one and two matrix multiplications fewer per head, respectively, and 25% and 50% fewer parameters, respectively, than standard SDPA, but perform similarly to standard SDPA in both vision and natural language tasks. They can be used in all applications where SDPA is used while offering smaller model sizes and faster training and inference without noticeable loss in performance. Super Attention introduces a new linear transformation on the values, transforming them from the left. It outperforms standard SPDA on vision and natural language tasks by up to 17% while having one fewer matrix multiplication per head and 25% fewer parameters than standard SDPA. Consequently, it is also faster than standard SDPA. Super Attention is ideal in applications where the attention layer's context length is fixed, such as Vision Transformers. In addition to providing mathematical reasoning, we evaluate the presented attention mechanisms on several datasets including MNIST, CIFAR100, ImageNet, IMDB Movie Reviews, and Amazon Reviews datasets, as well as combined Europarl and Anki English-Spanish datasets for neural machine translation.
A pivotal advancement in the progress of large language models (LLMs) is the emergence of the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs. Compared to traditional LLMs, MoE LLMs can achieve higher performance with fewer parameters, but it is still hard to deploy them due to their immense parameter sizes. Different from previous weight pruning methods that rely on specifically designed hardware, this paper mainly aims to enhance the deployment efficiency of MoE LLMs by introducing plug-and-play expert-level sparsification techniques. Specifically, we propose, for the first time to our best knowledge, post-training approaches for task-agnostic and task-specific expert pruning and skipping of MoE LLMs, tailored to improve deployment efficiency while maintaining model performance across a wide range of tasks. Extensive experiments show that our proposed methods can simultaneously reduce model sizes and increase the inference speed, while maintaining satisfactory performance. Data and code will be available at //github.com/Lucky-Lance/Expert_Sparsity.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for handling graph-type data. Recently, GNNs have been widely applied in various domains, but they also face some issues, such as overfitting, over-smoothing and non-robustness. The existing research indicates that random dropout methods are an effective way to address these issues. However, random dropout methods in GNNs still face unresolved problems. Currently, the choice of dropout rate, often determined by heuristic or grid search methods, can increase the generalization error, contradicting the principal aims of dropout. In this paper, we propose a novel random dropout method for GNNs called FlexiDrop. First, we conduct a theoretical analysis of dropout in GNNs using rademacher complexity and demonstrate that the generalization error of traditional random dropout methods is constrained by a function related to the dropout rate. Subsequently, we use this function as a regularizer to unify the dropout rate and empirical loss within a single loss function, optimizing them simultaneously. Therefore, our method enables adaptive adjustment of the dropout rate and theoretically balances the trade-off between model complexity and generalization ability. Furthermore, extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets show that FlexiDrop outperforms traditional random dropout methods in GNNs.
Communication is a fundamental aspect of human society, facilitating the exchange of information and beliefs among people. Despite the advancements in large language models (LLMs), recent agents built with these often neglect the control over discussion tactics, which are essential in communication scenarios and games. As a variant of the famous communication game Werewolf, One Night Ultimate Werewolf (ONUW) requires players to develop strategic discussion policies due to the potential role changes that increase the uncertainty and complexity of the game. In this work, we first present the existence of the Perfect Bayesian Equilibria (PBEs) in two scenarios of the ONUW game: one with discussion and one without. The results showcase that the discussion greatly changes players' utilities by affecting their beliefs, emphasizing the significance of discussion tactics. Based on the insights obtained from the analyses, we propose an RL-instructed language agent framework, where a discussion policy trained by reinforcement learning (RL) is employed to determine appropriate discussion tactics to adopt. Our experimental results on several ONUW game settings demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed framework.
Although large language models (LLMs) are impressive in solving various tasks, they can quickly be outdated after deployment. Maintaining their up-to-date status is a pressing concern in the current era. This paper provides a comprehensive review of recent advances in aligning LLMs with the ever-changing world knowledge without re-training from scratch. We categorize research works systemically and provide in-depth comparisons and discussion. We also discuss existing challenges and highlight future directions to facilitate research in this field. We release the paper list at //github.com/hyintell/awesome-refreshing-llms
Knowledge plays a critical role in artificial intelligence. Recently, the extensive success of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has raised significant attention about how knowledge can be acquired, maintained, updated and used by language models. Despite the enormous amount of related studies, there still lacks a unified view of how knowledge circulates within language models throughout the learning, tuning, and application processes, which may prevent us from further understanding the connections between current progress or realizing existing limitations. In this survey, we revisit PLMs as knowledge-based systems by dividing the life circle of knowledge in PLMs into five critical periods, and investigating how knowledge circulates when it is built, maintained and used. To this end, we systematically review existing studies of each period of the knowledge life cycle, summarize the main challenges and current limitations, and discuss future directions.
We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT representations can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE benchmark to 80.4% (7.6% absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7 (5.6% absolute improvement) and the SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5% absolute improvement), outperforming human performance by 2.0%.