Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools capable of accomplishing a broad spectrum of tasks. Their abilities span numerous areas, and one area where they have made a significant impact is in the domain of code generation. In this context, we view LLMs as mutation and crossover tools. Meanwhile, Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms are known to discover diverse and robust solutions. By merging the code-generating abilities of LLMs with the diversity and robustness of QD solutions, we introduce LLMatic, a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithm. While LLMs struggle to conduct NAS directly through prompts, LLMatic uses a procedural approach, leveraging QD for prompts and network architecture to create diverse and highly performant networks. We test LLMatic on the CIFAR-10 image classification benchmark, demonstrating that it can produce competitive networks with just $2,000$ searches, even without prior knowledge of the benchmark domain or exposure to any previous top-performing models for the benchmark.
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming attractive as few-shot reasoners to solve Natural Language (NL)-related tasks. However, there is still much to learn about how well LLMs understand structured data, such as tables. While it is true that tables can be used as inputs to LLMs with serialization, there is a lack of comprehensive studies examining whether LLMs can truly comprehend such data. In this paper, we try to understand this by designing a benchmark to evaluate the structural understanding capabilities (SUC) of LLMs. The benchmark we create includes seven tasks, each with its own unique challenges, \eg, cell lookup, row retrieval, and size detection. We conduct a series of evaluations on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. We find that the performance varied depending on several input choices, including table input format, content order, role prompting, and partition marks. Drawing from the insights gained through the benchmark evaluations, we propose \textit{self-augmentation} for effective structural prompting, such as critical value / range identification using LLMs' internal knowledge. When combined with carefully chosen input choices, these structural prompting methods lead to promising improvements in LLM performance on a variety of tabular tasks, \eg, TabFact($\uparrow2.31\%$), HybridQA($\uparrow2.13\%$), SQA($\uparrow2.72\%$), Feverous($\uparrow0.84\%$), and ToTTo($\uparrow5.68\%$). We believe that our benchmark and proposed prompting methods can serve as a simple yet generic selection for future research.
Toeplitz Neural Networks (TNNs) have exhibited outstanding performance in various sequence modeling tasks. They outperform commonly used Transformer-based models while benefiting from log-linear space-time complexities. On the other hand, State Space Models (SSMs) achieve lower performance than TNNs in language modeling but offer the advantage of constant inference complexity. In this paper, we aim to combine the strengths of TNNs and SSMs by converting TNNs to SSMs during inference, thereby enabling TNNs to achieve the same constant inference complexities as SSMs. To accomplish this, we formulate the conversion process as an optimization problem and provide a closed-form solution. We demonstrate how to transform the target equation into a Vandermonde linear system problem, which can be efficiently solved using the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). Notably, our method requires no training and maintains numerical stability. It can be also applied to any LongConv-based model. To assess its effectiveness, we conduct extensive experiments on language modeling tasks across various settings. Additionally, we compare our method to other gradient-descent solutions, highlighting the superior numerical stability of our approach. The source code is available at //github.com/OpenNLPLab/ETSC-Exact-Toeplitz-to-SSM-Conversion.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on coding related tasks, particularly on assisting humans in programming and facilitating programming automation. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating the code understanding and generation capacities of LLMs suffer from severe limitations. First, most benchmarks are deficient as they focus on a narrow range of popular programming languages and specific tasks, whereas the real-world software development scenarios show dire need to implement systems with multilingual programming environments to satisfy diverse requirements. Practical programming practices also strongly expect multi-task settings for testing coding capabilities of LLMs comprehensively and robustly. Second, most benchmarks also fail to consider the actual executability and the consistency of execution results of the generated code. To bridge these gaps between existing benchmarks and expectations from practical applications, we introduce CodeScope, an execution-based, multilingual, multi-task, multi-dimensional evaluation benchmark for comprehensively gauging LLM capabilities on coding tasks. CodeScope covers 43 programming languages and 8 coding tasks. It evaluates the coding performance of LLMs from three dimensions (perspectives): difficulty, efficiency, and length. To facilitate execution-based evaluations of code generation, we develop MultiCodeEngine, an automated code execution engine that supports 14 programming languages. Finally, we systematically evaluate and analyze 8 mainstream LLMs on CodeScope tasks and demonstrate the superior breadth and challenges of CodeScope for evaluating LLMs on code understanding and generation tasks compared to other benchmarks. The CodeScope benchmark and datasets are publicly available at //github.com/WeixiangYAN/CodeScope.
ChatGPT has demonstrated impressive performance in various downstream tasks. However, in the Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) task, we observe a discrepancy: while ChatGPT performs well under human evaluation, it scores poorly according to traditional metrics. We believe this inconsistency arises because the traditional metrics are not well-suited for evaluating generative models. Their overly strict length and phonics constraints may lead to underestimating ChatGPT's correction capabilities. To better evaluate generative models in the CSC task, this paper proposes a new evaluation metric: Eval-GCSC. By incorporating word-level and semantic similarity judgments, it relaxes the stringent length and phonics constraints. Experimental results show that Eval-GCSC closely aligns with human evaluations. Under this metric, ChatGPT's performance is comparable to traditional token-level classification models (TCM), demonstrating its potential as a CSC tool. The source code and scripts can be accessed at //github.com/ktlKTL/Eval-GCSC.
Despite Multi-modal Large Language Models (MM-LLMs) have made exciting strides recently, they are still struggling to efficiently model the interactions among multi-modal inputs and the generation in non-textual modalities. In this work, we propose TEAL (Tokenize and Embed ALl)}, an approach to treat the input from any modality as a token sequence and learn a joint embedding space for all modalities. Specifically, for the input from any modality, TEAL first discretizes it into a token sequence with the off-the-shelf tokenizer and embeds the token sequence into a joint embedding space with a learnable embedding matrix. MM-LLMs just need to predict the multi-modal tokens autoregressively as the textual LLMs do. Finally, the corresponding de-tokenizer is applied to generate the output in each modality based on the predicted token sequence. With the joint embedding space, TEAL enables the frozen LLMs to perform both understanding and generation tasks involving non-textual modalities, such as image and audio. Thus, the textual LLM can just work as an interface and maintain its high performance in textual understanding and generation. Experiments show that TEAL achieves substantial improvements in multi-modal understanding, and implements a simple scheme for multi-modal generations.
Black-box Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great power in solving various tasks and are considered general problem solvers. However, LLMs still fail in many specific tasks although understand the task instruction. In this paper, we focus on the problem of boosting the ability of black-box LLMs to solve downstream tasks. We propose ExpNote, an automated framework to help LLMs better adapt to unfamiliar tasks through reflecting and noting experiences from training data and retrieving them from external memory during testing. We evaluate ExpNote on multiple tasks and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the performance of black-box LLMs. The data and code are available at //github.com/forangel2014/ExpNote
Database Management System (DBMS) fuzzing is an automated testing technique aimed at detecting errors and vulnerabilities in DBMSs by generating, mutating, and executing test cases. It not only reduces the time and cost of manual testing but also enhances detection coverage, providing valuable assistance in developing commercial DBMSs. Existing fuzzing surveys mainly focus on general-purpose software. However, DBMSs are different from them in terms of internal structure, input/output, and test objectives, requiring specialized fuzzing strategies. Therefore, this paper focuses on DBMS fuzzing and provides a comprehensive review and comparison of the methods in this field. We first introduce the fundamental concepts. Then, we systematically define a general fuzzing procedure and decompose and categorize existing methods. Furthermore, we classify existing methods from the testing objective perspective, covering various components in DBMSs. For representative works, more detailed descriptions are provided to analyze their strengths and limitations. To objectively evaluate the performance of each method, we present an open-source DBMS fuzzing toolkit, OpenDBFuzz. Based on this toolkit, we conduct a detailed experimental comparative analysis of existing methods and finally discuss future research directions.
Prior work on Private Inference (PI)--inferences performed directly on encrypted input--has focused on minimizing a network's ReLUs, which have been assumed to dominate PI latency rather than FLOPs. Recent work has shown that FLOPs for PI can no longer be ignored and have high latency penalties. In this paper, we develop DeepReShape, a network redesign technique that tailors architectures to PI constraints, optimizing for both ReLUs and FLOPs for the first time. The {\em key insight} is that a strategic allocation of channels such that the network's ReLUs are aligned in their criticality order simultaneously optimizes ReLU and FLOPs efficiency. DeepReShape automates network development with an efficient process, and we call generated networks HybReNets. We evaluate DeepReShape using standard PI benchmarks and demonstrate a 2.1\% accuracy gain with a 5.2$\times$ runtime improvement at iso-ReLU on CIFAR-100 and an 8.7$\times$ runtime improvement at iso-accuracy on TinyImageNet. Furthermore, we demystify the input network selection in prior ReLU optimizations and shed light on the key network attributes enabling PI efficiency.
Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to learn representations for entities and relations. Most KGE models have gained great success, especially on extrapolation scenarios. Specifically, given an unseen triple (h, r, t), a trained model can still correctly predict t from (h, r, ?), or h from (?, r, t), such extrapolation ability is impressive. However, most existing KGE works focus on the design of delicate triple modeling function, which mainly tells us how to measure the plausibility of observed triples, but offers limited explanation of why the methods can extrapolate to unseen data, and what are the important factors to help KGE extrapolate. Therefore in this work, we attempt to study the KGE extrapolation of two problems: 1. How does KGE extrapolate to unseen data? 2. How to design the KGE model with better extrapolation ability? For the problem 1, we first discuss the impact factors for extrapolation and from relation, entity and triple level respectively, propose three Semantic Evidences (SEs), which can be observed from train set and provide important semantic information for extrapolation. Then we verify the effectiveness of SEs through extensive experiments on several typical KGE methods. For the problem 2, to make better use of the three levels of SE, we propose a novel GNN-based KGE model, called Semantic Evidence aware Graph Neural Network (SE-GNN). In SE-GNN, each level of SE is modeled explicitly by the corresponding neighbor pattern, and merged sufficiently by the multi-layer aggregation, which contributes to obtaining more extrapolative knowledge representation. Finally, through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that SE-GNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on Knowledge Graph Completion task and performs a better extrapolation ability.
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.