Large Language Models~(LLMs) have demonstrated incredible capabilities in understanding, generating, and manipulating languages. Through human-model interactions, LLMs can automatically understand human-issued instructions and output the expected contents, which can significantly increase working efficiency. In various types of real-world demands, editing-oriented tasks account for a considerable proportion, which involves an interactive process that entails the continuous refinement of existing texts to meet specific criteria. Due to the need for multi-round human-model interaction and the generation of complicated editing tasks, there is an emergent need for efficient general editing models. In this paper, we propose \underline{\textbf{G}}eneral \underline{\textbf{SP}}arse \underline{\textbf{E}}fficient \underline{\textbf{E}}diting Mo\underline{\textbf{D}}el~(\textbf{G-SPEED}), which can fulfill diverse editing requirements through a single model while maintaining low computational costs. Specifically, we first propose a novel unsupervised text editing data clustering algorithm to deal with the data scarcity problem. Subsequently, we introduce a sparse editing model architecture to mitigate the inherently limited learning capabilities of small language models. The experimental outcomes indicate that G-SPEED, with its 508M parameters, can surpass LLMs equipped with 175B parameters. Our code and model checkpoints are available at \url{//github.com/Banner-Z/G-SPEED}.
The unprecedented advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown a profound impact on natural language processing but are yet to fully embrace the realm of 3D understanding. This paper introduces PointLLM, a preliminary effort to fill this gap, enabling LLMs to understand point clouds and offering a new avenue beyond 2D visual data. PointLLM understands colored object point clouds with human instructions and generates contextually appropriate responses, illustrating its grasp of point clouds and common sense. Specifically, it leverages a point cloud encoder with a powerful LLM to effectively fuse geometric, appearance, and linguistic information. We collect a novel dataset comprising 660K simple and 70K complex point-text instruction pairs to enable a two-stage training strategy: aligning latent spaces and subsequently instruction-tuning the unified model. To rigorously evaluate the perceptual and generalization capabilities of PointLLM, we establish two benchmarks: Generative 3D Object Classification and 3D Object Captioning, assessed through three different methods, including human evaluation, GPT-4/ChatGPT evaluation, and traditional metrics. Experimental results reveal PointLLM's superior performance over existing 2D and 3D baselines, with a notable achievement in human-evaluated object captioning tasks where it surpasses human annotators in over 50% of the samples. Codes, datasets, and benchmarks are available at //github.com/OpenRobotLab/PointLLM .
Large language models (LMs) are currently trained to predict tokens given document prefixes, enabling them to directly perform long-form generation and prompting-style tasks which can be reduced to document completion. Existing pretraining pipelines train LMs by concatenating random sets of short documents to create input contexts but the prior documents provide no signal for predicting the next document. We instead present In-Context Pretraining, a new approach where language models are pretrained on a sequence of related documents, thereby explicitly encouraging them to read and reason across document boundaries. We can do In-Context Pretraining by simply changing the document ordering so that each context contains related documents, and directly applying existing pretraining pipelines. However, this document sorting problem is challenging. There are billions of documents and we would like the sort to maximize contextual similarity for every document without repeating any data. To do this, we introduce approximate algorithms for finding related documents with efficient nearest neighbor search and constructing coherent input contexts with a graph traversal algorithm. Our experiments show In-Context Pretraining offers a simple and scalable approach to significantly enhance LMs'performance: we see notable improvements in tasks that require more complex contextual reasoning, including in-context learning (+8%), reading comprehension (+15%), faithfulness to previous contexts (+16%), long-context reasoning (+5%), and retrieval augmentation (+9%).
With their exceptional natural language processing capabilities, tools based on Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Co-Pilot have swiftly become indispensable resources in the software developer's toolkit. While recent studies suggest the potential productivity gains these tools can unlock, users still encounter drawbacks, such as generic or incorrect answers. Additionally, the pursuit of improved responses often leads to extensive prompt engineering efforts, diverting valuable time from writing code that delivers actual value. To address these challenges, a new breed of tools, built atop LLMs, is emerging. These tools aim to mitigate drawbacks by employing techniques like fine-tuning or enriching user prompts with contextualized information. In this paper, we delve into the lessons learned by a software development team venturing into the creation of such a contextualized LLM-based application, using retrieval-based techniques, called CodeBuddy. Over a four-month period, the team, despite lacking prior professional experience in LLM-based applications, built the product from scratch. Following the initial product release, we engaged with the development team responsible for the code generative components. Through interviews and analysis of the application's issue tracker, we uncover various intriguing challenges that teams working on LLM-based applications might encounter. For instance, we found three main group of lessons: LLM-based lessons, User-based lessons, and Technical lessons. By understanding these lessons, software development teams could become better prepared to build LLM-based applications.
Despite efforts to align large language models (LLMs) with human values, widely-used LLMs such as GPT, Llama, Claude, and PaLM are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, wherein an adversary fools a targeted LLM into generating objectionable content. To address this vulnerability, we propose SmoothLLM, the first algorithm designed to mitigate jailbreaking attacks on LLMs. Based on our finding that adversarially-generated prompts are brittle to character-level changes, our defense first randomly perturbs multiple copies of a given input prompt, and then aggregates the corresponding predictions to detect adversarial inputs. SmoothLLM reduces the attack success rate on numerous popular LLMs to below one percentage point, avoids unnecessary conservatism, and admits provable guarantees on attack mitigation. Moreover, our defense uses exponentially fewer queries than existing attacks and is compatible with any LLM. Our code is publicly available at the following link: //github.com/arobey1/smooth-llm.
Language Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in natural language understanding and generation, leading to their use in applications such as chatbots and virtual assistants. However, existing LLM frameworks face limitations in handling domain-specific data analytics tasks with rich data structures. Moreover, they struggle with flexibility to meet diverse user requirements. To address these issues, TaskWeaver is proposed as a code-first framework for building LLM-powered autonomous agents. It converts user requests into executable code and treats user-defined plugins as callable functions. TaskWeaver provides support for rich data structures, flexible plugin usage, and dynamic plugin selection, and leverages LLM coding capabilities for complex logic. It also incorporates domain-specific knowledge through examples and ensures the secure execution of generated code. TaskWeaver offers a powerful and flexible framework for creating intelligent conversational agents that can handle complex tasks and adapt to domain-specific scenarios. The code is open-sourced at //github.com/microsoft/TaskWeaver/.
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have drawn significant attention due to their outstanding reasoning capabilities and extensive knowledge repository, positioning them as superior in handling various natural language processing tasks compared to other language models. In this paper, we present a preliminary investigation into the potential of LLMs in fact-checking. This study aims to comprehensively evaluate various LLMs in tackling specific fact-checking subtasks, systematically evaluating their capabilities, and conducting a comparative analysis of their performance against pre-trained and state-of-the-art low-parameter models. Experiments demonstrate that LLMs achieve competitive performance compared to other small models in most scenarios. However, they encounter challenges in effectively handling Chinese fact verification and the entirety of the fact-checking pipeline due to language inconsistencies and hallucinations. These findings underscore the need for further exploration and research to enhance the proficiency of LLMs as reliable fact-checkers, unveiling the potential capability of LLMs and the possible challenges in fact-checking tasks.
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.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
We propose a knowledge-enhanced approach, ERNIE-ViL, to learn joint representations of vision and language. ERNIE-ViL tries to construct the detailed semantic connections (objects, attributes of objects and relationships between objects in visual scenes) across vision and language, which are essential to vision-language cross-modal tasks. Incorporating knowledge from scene graphs, ERNIE-ViL constructs Scene Graph Prediction tasks, i.e., Object Prediction, Attribute Prediction and Relationship Prediction in the pre-training phase. More specifically, these prediction tasks are implemented by predicting nodes of different types in the scene graph parsed from the sentence. Thus, ERNIE-ViL can model the joint representation characterizing the alignments of the detailed semantics across vision and language. Pre-trained on two large image-text alignment datasets (Conceptual Captions and SBU), ERNIE-ViL learns better and more robust joint representations. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5 vision-language downstream tasks after fine-tuning ERNIE-ViL. Furthermore, it ranked the 1st place on the VCR leader-board with an absolute improvement of 3.7%.
Named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese is essential but difficult because of the lack of natural delimiters. Therefore, Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is usually considered as the first step for Chinese NER. However, models based on word-level embeddings and lexicon features often suffer from segmentation errors and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we investigate a Convolutional Attention Network called CAN for Chinese NER, which consists of a character-based convolutional neural network (CNN) with local-attention layer and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with global self-attention layer to capture the information from adjacent characters and sentence contexts. Also, compared to other models, not depending on any external resources like lexicons and employing small size of char embeddings make our model more practical. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods without word embedding and external lexicon resources on different domain datasets including Weibo, MSRA and Chinese Resume NER dataset.