Instruction tuning for large language models (LLMs) can drive them to produce results consistent with human goals in specific downstream tasks. However, the process of continual instruction tuning (CIT) for LLMs may bring about the catastrophic forgetting (CF) problem, where previously learned abilities are degraded. Recent methods try to alleviate the CF problem by modifying models or replaying data, which may only remember the surface-level pattern of instructions and get confused on held-out tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel continual instruction tuning method based on Key-part Information Gain (KPIG). Our method computes the information gain on masked parts to dynamically replay data and refine the training objective, which enables LLMs to capture task-aware information relevant to the correct response and alleviate overfitting to general descriptions in instructions. In addition, we propose two metrics, P-score and V-score, to measure the generalization and instruction-following abilities of LLMs. Experiments demonstrate our method achieves superior performance on both seen and held-out tasks.
We investigate the role of various demonstration components in the in-context learning (ICL) performance of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we explore the impacts of ground-truth labels, input distribution, and complementary explanations, particularly when these are altered or perturbed. We build on previous work, which offers mixed findings on how these elements influence ICL. To probe these questions, we employ explainable NLP (XNLP) methods and utilize saliency maps of contrastive demonstrations for both qualitative and quantitative analysis. Our findings reveal that flipping ground-truth labels significantly affects the saliency, though it's more noticeable in larger LLMs. Our analysis of the input distribution at a granular level reveals that changing sentiment-indicative terms in a sentiment analysis task to neutral ones does not have as substantial an impact as altering ground-truth labels. Finally, we find that the effectiveness of complementary explanations in boosting ICL performance is task-dependent, with limited benefits seen in sentiment analysis tasks compared to symbolic reasoning tasks. These insights are critical for understanding the functionality of LLMs and guiding the development of effective demonstrations, which is increasingly relevant in light of the growing use of LLMs in applications such as ChatGPT. Our research code is publicly available at //github.com/paihengxu/XICL.
As large language models (LLMs) see increasing adoption across the globe, it is imperative for LLMs to be representative of the linguistic diversity of the world. India is a linguistically diverse country of 1.4 Billion people. To facilitate research on multilingual LLM evaluation, we release IndicGenBench - the largest benchmark for evaluating LLMs on user-facing generation tasks across a diverse set 29 of Indic languages covering 13 scripts and 4 language families. IndicGenBench is composed of diverse generation tasks like cross-lingual summarization, machine translation, and cross-lingual question answering. IndicGenBench extends existing benchmarks to many Indic languages through human curation providing multi-way parallel evaluation data for many under-represented Indic languages for the first time. We evaluate a wide range of proprietary and open-source LLMs including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, PaLM-2, mT5, Gemma, BLOOM and LLaMA on IndicGenBench in a variety of settings. The largest PaLM-2 models performs the best on most tasks, however, there is a significant performance gap in all languages compared to English showing that further research is needed for the development of more inclusive multilingual language models. IndicGenBench is released at www.github.com/google-research-datasets/indic-gen-bench
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities on specific tasks with human-written instruction data. However, the limited quantity, diversity, and professional expertise of such instruction data raise concerns about the performance of LLMs in psychotherapy tasks when provided with domain-specific instructions. To address this, we firstly propose Domain-Specific Assistant Instructions based on AlexanderStreet therapy, and secondly, we use an adaption fine-tuning method and retrieval augmented generation method to improve pre-trained LLMs. Through quantitative evaluation of linguistic quality using automatic and human evaluation, we observe that pre-trained LLMs on Psychotherapy Assistant Instructions outperform state-of-the-art LLMs response baselines. Our Assistant-Instruction approach offers a half-annotation method to align pre-trained LLMs with instructions and provide pre-trained LLMs with more psychotherapy knowledge.
Recognizing characters and predicting speakers of dialogue are critical for comic processing tasks, such as voice generation or translation. However, because characters vary by comic title, supervised learning approaches like training character classifiers which require specific annotations for each comic title are infeasible. This motivates us to propose a novel zero-shot approach, allowing machines to identify characters and predict speaker names based solely on unannotated comic images. In spite of their importance in real-world applications, these task have largely remained unexplored due to challenges in story comprehension and multimodal integration. Recent large language models (LLMs) have shown great capability for text understanding and reasoning, while their application to multimodal content analysis is still an open problem. To address this problem, we propose an iterative multimodal framework, the first to employ multimodal information for both character identification and speaker prediction tasks. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, establishing a robust baseline for these tasks. Furthermore, since our method requires no training data or annotations, it can be used as-is on any comic series.
Mainstream poisoning attacks on large language models (LLMs) typically set a fixed trigger in the input instance and specific responses for triggered queries. However, the fixed trigger setting (e.g., unusual words) may be easily detected by human detection, limiting the effectiveness and practicality in real-world scenarios. To enhance the stealthiness of the trigger, we present a poisoning attack against LLMs that is triggered by a generation/output condition-token limitation, which is a commonly adopted strategy by users for reducing costs. The poisoned model performs normally for output without token limitation, while becomes harmful for output with limited tokens. To achieve this objective, we introduce BrieFool, an efficient attack framework. It leverages the characteristics of generation limitation by efficient instruction sampling and poisoning data generation, thereby influencing the behavior of LLMs under target conditions. Our experiments demonstrate that BrieFool is effective across safety domains and knowledge domains. For instance, with only 20 generated poisoning examples against GPT-3.5-turbo, BrieFool achieves a 100% Attack Success Rate (ASR) and a 9.28/10 average Harmfulness Score (HS) under token limitation conditions while maintaining the benign performance.
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. The great promise of LLMs as general task solvers motivated people to extend their functionality largely beyond just a ``chatbot'', and use it as an assistant or even replacement for domain experts and tools in specific domains such as healthcare, finance, and education. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). To fill such a gap, explosively-increase research, and practices have been conducted in very recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs, which, however, calls for a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarizes and guide this promising domain. In this survey paper, first, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain-specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. We also present a comprehensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Furthermore, we offer insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.
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.
Following unprecedented success on the natural language tasks, Transformers have been successfully applied to several computer vision problems, achieving state-of-the-art results and prompting researchers to reconsider the supremacy of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as {de facto} operators. Capitalizing on these advances in computer vision, the medical imaging field has also witnessed growing interest for Transformers that can capture global context compared to CNNs with local receptive fields. Inspired from this transition, in this survey, we attempt to provide a comprehensive review of the applications of Transformers in medical imaging covering various aspects, ranging from recently proposed architectural designs to unsolved issues. Specifically, we survey the use of Transformers in medical image segmentation, detection, classification, reconstruction, synthesis, registration, clinical report generation, and other tasks. In particular, for each of these applications, we develop taxonomy, identify application-specific challenges as well as provide insights to solve them, and highlight recent trends. Further, we provide a critical discussion of the field's current state as a whole, including the identification of key challenges, open problems, and outlining promising future directions. We hope this survey will ignite further interest in the community and provide researchers with an up-to-date reference regarding applications of Transformer models in medical imaging. Finally, to cope with the rapid development in this field, we intend to regularly update the relevant latest papers and their open-source implementations at \url{//github.com/fahadshamshad/awesome-transformers-in-medical-imaging}.
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.
Recently pre-trained language representation models such as BERT have shown great success when fine-tuned on downstream tasks including information retrieval (IR). However, pre-training objectives tailored for ad-hoc retrieval have not been well explored. In this paper, we propose Pre-training with Representative wOrds Prediction (PROP) for ad-hoc retrieval. PROP is inspired by the classical statistical language model for IR, specifically the query likelihood model, which assumes that the query is generated as the piece of text representative of the "ideal" document. Based on this idea, we construct the representative words prediction (ROP) task for pre-training. Given an input document, we sample a pair of word sets according to the document language model, where the set with higher likelihood is deemed as more representative of the document. We then pre-train the Transformer model to predict the pairwise preference between the two word sets, jointly with the Masked Language Model (MLM) objective. By further fine-tuning on a variety of representative downstream ad-hoc retrieval tasks, PROP achieves significant improvements over baselines without pre-training or with other pre-training methods. We also show that PROP can achieve exciting performance under both the zero- and low-resource IR settings. The code and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/Albert-Ma/PROP.