Large language models (LLMs) are capable to perform complex reasoning by in-context learning (ICL) when provided with a few input-output demonstrations (demos) and more powerful when intermediate reasoning steps ("chain of thoughts (CoT)") of the demos are given. Is it necessary to use multi-demo in ICL? In this paper, we study ICL using fewer demos for each test query on the tasks in~\cite{wei2022chain}. Surprisingly, we do not observe significant degradation when using only one randomly chosen demo. To study this phenomenon, for each test query, we categorize demos into "correct demos" leading to the correct answer, and "wrong demos" resulting in wrong answers. Our analysis reveals an inherent bias in those widely studied datasets: most demos are correct for a majority of test queries, which explains the good performance of using one random demo. Moreover, ICL (with and w/o CoT) using only one correct demo significantly outperforms all-demo ICL adopted by most previous works, indicating the weakness of LLMs in finding correct demo(s) for input queries, which is difficult to evaluate on the biased datasets. Furthermore, we observe a counterintuitive behavior of ICL using multi-demo, i.e., its accuracy degrades(improves) when given more correct(wrong) demos. This implies that ICL can be easily misguided by interference among demos and their spurious correlations. Our analyses highlight several fundamental challenges that need to be addressed in LLMs training, ICL, and benchmark design.
Current large language models, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, have captured the public's attention because how remarkable they are in the use of language. Here, I demonstrate that ChatGPT displays phonological biases that are a hallmark of human language processing. More concretely, just like humans, ChatGPT has a consonant bias. That is, the chatbot has a tendency to use consonants over vowels to identify words. This is observed across languages that differ in their relative distribution of consonants and vowels such as English and Spanish. Despite the differences in how current artificial intelligence language models are trained to process linguistic stimuli and how human infants acquire language, such training seems to be enough for the emergence of a phonological bias in ChatGPT
Structure prediction tasks such as event extraction require an in-depth understanding of the output structure and sub-task dependencies, thus they still heavily rely on task-specific training data to obtain reasonable performance. Due to the high cost of human annotation, low-resource event extraction, which requires minimal human cost, is urgently needed in real-world information extraction applications. We propose to synthesize data instances given limited seed demonstrations to boost low-resource event extraction performance. We propose STAR, a structure-to-text data generation method that first generates complicated event structures (Y) and then generates input passages (X), all with Large Language Models. We design fine-grained step-by-step instructions and the error cases and quality issues identified through self-reflection can be self-refined. Our experiments indicate that data generated by STAR can significantly improve the low-resource event extraction performance and they are even more effective than human-curated data points in some cases.
With large Foundation Models (FMs), language technologies (AI in general) are entering a new paradigm: eliminating the need for developing large-scale task-specific datasets and supporting a variety of tasks through set-ups ranging from zero-shot to few-shot learning. However, understanding FMs capabilities requires a systematic benchmarking effort by comparing FMs performance with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) task-specific models. With that goal, past work focused on the English language and included a few efforts with multiple languages. Our study contributes to ongoing research by evaluating FMs performance for standard Arabic NLP and Speech processing, including a range of tasks from sequence tagging to content classification across diverse domains. We start with zero-shot learning using GPT-3.5-turbo, Whisper, and USM, addressing 33 unique tasks using 59 publicly available datasets resulting in 96 test setups. For a few tasks, FMs performs on par or exceeds the performance of the SOTA models but for the majority it under-performs. Given the importance of prompt for the FMs performance, we discuss our prompt strategies in detail and elaborate on our findings. Our future work on Arabic AI will explore few-shot prompting, expand the range of tasks, and investigate additional open-source models.
Recently, with the chain of thought (CoT) prompting, large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-3, have shown strong reasoning ability in several natural language processing tasks such as arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning. However, LLMs with CoT require multi-step prompting and multi-token prediction, which is highly sensitive to individual mistakes and vulnerable to error accumulation. The above issues make the LLMs need the ability to verify the answers. In fact, after inferring conclusions in some thinking decision tasks, people often check them by re-verifying steps to avoid some mistakes. In this paper, we propose and prove that LLMs also have similar self-verification abilities. We take the conclusion obtained by CoT as one of the conditions for solving the original problem. By taking turns masking the original conditions and predicting their results, we calculate an explainable answer verification score based on whether the re-predicted conditions are correct. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the reasoning performance on various arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning datasets.
Due to the diffusion of IoT, modern software systems are often thought to control and coordinate smart devices in order to manage assets and resources, and to guarantee efficient behaviours. For this class of systems, which interact extensively with humans and with their environment, it is thus crucial to guarantee their correct behaviour in order to avoid unexpected and possibly dangerous situations. In this paper we will present a framework that allows us to measure the robustness of systems. This is the ability of a program to tolerate changes in the environmental conditions and preserving the original behaviour. In the proposed framework, the interaction of a program with its environment is represented as a sequence of random variables describing how both evolve in time. For this reason, the considered measures will be defined among probability distributions of observed data. The proposed framework will be then used to define the notions of adaptability and reliability. The former indicates the ability of a program to absorb perturbation on environmental conditions after a given amount of time. The latter expresses the ability of a program to maintain its intended behaviour (up-to some reasonable tolerance) despite the presence of perturbations in the environment. Moreover, an algorithm, based on statistical inference, it proposed to evaluate the proposed metric and the aforementioned properties. Throughout the paper, two case studies are used to the describe and evaluate the proposed approach.
Language is essentially a complex, intricate system of human expressions governed by grammatical rules. It poses a significant challenge to develop capable AI algorithms for comprehending and grasping a language. As a major approach, language modeling has been widely studied for language understanding and generation in the past two decades, evolving from statistical language models to neural language models. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been proposed by pre-training Transformer models over large-scale corpora, showing strong capabilities in solving various NLP tasks. Since researchers have found that model scaling can lead to performance improvement, they further study the scaling effect by increasing the model size to an even larger size. Interestingly, when the parameter scale exceeds a certain level, these enlarged language models not only achieve a significant performance improvement but also show some special abilities that are not present in small-scale language models. To discriminate the difference in parameter scale, the research community has coined the term large language models (LLM) for the PLMs of significant size. Recently, the research on LLMs has been largely advanced by both academia and industry, and a remarkable progress is the launch of ChatGPT, which has attracted widespread attention from society. The technical evolution of LLMs has been making an important impact on the entire AI community, which would revolutionize the way how we develop and use AI algorithms. In this survey, we review the recent advances of LLMs by introducing the background, key findings, and mainstream techniques. In particular, we focus on four major aspects of LLMs, namely pre-training, adaptation tuning, utilization, and capacity evaluation. Besides, we also summarize the available resources for developing LLMs and discuss the remaining issues for future directions.
Computing is a critical driving force in the development of human civilization. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of intelligent computing, a new computing paradigm that is reshaping traditional computing and promoting digital revolution in the era of big data, artificial intelligence and internet-of-things with new computing theories, architectures, methods, systems, and applications. Intelligent computing has greatly broadened the scope of computing, extending it from traditional computing on data to increasingly diverse computing paradigms such as perceptual intelligence, cognitive intelligence, autonomous intelligence, and human-computer fusion intelligence. Intelligence and computing have undergone paths of different evolution and development for a long time but have become increasingly intertwined in recent years: intelligent computing is not only intelligence-oriented but also intelligence-driven. Such cross-fertilization has prompted the emergence and rapid advancement of intelligent computing. Intelligent computing is still in its infancy and an abundance of innovations in the theories, systems, and applications of intelligent computing are expected to occur soon. We present the first comprehensive survey of literature on intelligent computing, covering its theory fundamentals, the technological fusion of intelligence and computing, important applications, challenges, and future perspectives. We believe that this survey is highly timely and will provide a comprehensive reference and cast valuable insights into intelligent computing for academic and industrial researchers and practitioners.
This paper surveys and organizes research works in a new paradigm in natural language processing, which we dub "prompt-based learning". Unlike traditional supervised learning, which trains a model to take in an input x and predict an output y as P(y|x), prompt-based learning is based on language models that model the probability of text directly. To use these models to perform prediction tasks, the original input x is modified using a template into a textual string prompt x' that has some unfilled slots, and then the language model is used to probabilistically fill the unfilled information to obtain a final string x, from which the final output y can be derived. This framework is powerful and attractive for a number of reasons: it allows the language model to be pre-trained on massive amounts of raw text, and by defining a new prompting function the model is able to perform few-shot or even zero-shot learning, adapting to new scenarios with few or no labeled data. In this paper we introduce the basics of this promising paradigm, describe a unified set of mathematical notations that can cover a wide variety of existing work, and organize existing work along several dimensions, e.g.the choice of pre-trained models, prompts, and tuning strategies. To make the field more accessible to interested beginners, we not only make a systematic review of existing works and a highly structured typology of prompt-based concepts, but also release other resources, e.g., a website //pretrain.nlpedia.ai/ including constantly-updated survey, and paperlist.
Machine reading comprehension (MRC) aims to teach machines to read and comprehend human languages, which is a long-standing goal of natural language processing (NLP). With the burst of deep neural networks and the evolution of contextualized language models (CLMs), the research of MRC has experienced two significant breakthroughs. MRC and CLM, as a phenomenon, have a great impact on the NLP community. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and comparative review on MRC covering overall research topics about 1) the origin and development of MRC and CLM, with a particular focus on the role of CLMs; 2) the impact of MRC and CLM to the NLP community; 3) the definition, datasets, and evaluation of MRC; 4) general MRC architecture and technical methods in the view of two-stage Encoder-Decoder solving architecture from the insights of the cognitive process of humans; 5) previous highlights, emerging topics, and our empirical analysis, among which we especially focus on what works in different periods of MRC researches. We propose a full-view categorization and new taxonomies on these topics. The primary views we have arrived at are that 1) MRC boosts the progress from language processing to understanding; 2) the rapid improvement of MRC systems greatly benefits from the development of CLMs; 3) the theme of MRC is gradually moving from shallow text matching to cognitive reasoning.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.