Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can guide language models to engage in complex multi-step reasoning. The quality of provided demonstrations significantly impacts the success of downstream inference tasks. While existing automated methods prioritize accuracy and semantics in these demonstrations, we show that the underlying reasoning patterns play a more crucial role in such tasks. In this paper, we propose Pattern-Aware CoT, a prompting method that considers the diversity of demonstration patterns. By incorporating patterns such as step length and reasoning process within intermediate steps, PA-CoT effectively mitigates the issue of bias induced by demonstrations and enables better generalization to diverse scenarios. We conduct experiments on nine reasoning benchmark tasks using two open-source LLMs. The results show that our method substantially enhances reasoning performance and exhibits robustness to errors. The code will be made publicly available.
An important aspect in developing language models that interact with humans is aligning their behavior to be useful and unharmful for their human users. This is usually achieved by tuning the model in a way that enhances desired behaviors and inhibits undesired ones, a process referred to as alignment. In this paper, we propose a theoretical approach called Behavior Expectation Bounds (BEB) which allows us to formally investigate several inherent characteristics and limitations of alignment in large language models. Importantly, we prove that within the limits of this framework, for any behavior that has a finite probability of being exhibited by the model, there exist prompts that can trigger the model into outputting this behavior, with probability that increases with the length of the prompt. This implies that any alignment process that attenuates an undesired behavior but does not remove it altogether, is not safe against adversarial prompting attacks. Furthermore, our framework hints at the mechanism by which leading alignment approaches such as reinforcement learning from human feedback make the LLM prone to being prompted into the undesired behaviors. This theoretical result is being experimentally demonstrated in large scale by the so called contemporary "chatGPT jailbreaks", where adversarial users trick the LLM into breaking its alignment guardrails by triggering it into acting as a malicious persona. Our results expose fundamental limitations in alignment of LLMs and bring to the forefront the need to devise reliable mechanisms for ensuring AI safety.
Current language models decode text token by token according to probabilistic distribution, and determining the appropriate candidates for the next token is crucial to ensure generation quality. This study introduces adaptive decoding, a mechanism that dynamically empowers language models to ascertain a sensible candidate set during generation. Specifically, we introduce an entropy-based metric called confidence and conceptualize determining the optimal candidate set as a confidence-increasing process. The rationality of including a token in the candidate set is assessed by leveraging the increment of confidence. Experimental results reveal that our method balances diversity and coherence well. The human evaluation shows that our method can generate human-preferred text. Additionally, our method can potentially improve the reasoning ability of language models.
We present Spectron, a novel approach to adapting pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to perform spoken question answering (QA) and speech continuation. By endowing the LLM with a pre-trained speech encoder, our model becomes able to take speech inputs and generate speech outputs. The entire system is trained end-to-end and operates directly on spectrograms, simplifying our architecture. Key to our approach is a training objective that jointly supervises speech recognition, text continuation, and speech synthesis using only paired speech-text pairs, enabling a `cross-modal' chain-of-thought within a single decoding pass. Our method surpasses existing spoken language models in speaker preservation and semantic coherence. Furthermore, the proposed model improves upon direct initialization in retaining the knowledge of the original LLM as demonstrated through spoken QA datasets. We release our audio samples (//michelleramanovich.github.io/spectron/spectron) and spoken QA dataset (//github.com/google-research-datasets/LLAMA1-Test-Set).
The task of persona-steered text generation requires large language models (LLMs) to generate text that reflects the distribution of views that an individual fitting a persona could have. People have multifaceted personas, but prior work on bias in LLM-generated opinions has only explored multiple-choice settings or one-dimensional personas. We define an incongruous persona as a persona with multiple traits where one trait makes its other traits less likely in human survey data, e.g. political liberals who support increased military spending. We find that LLMs are 9.7% less steerable towards incongruous personas than congruous ones, sometimes generating the stereotypical stance associated with its demographic rather than the target stance. Models that we evaluate that are fine-tuned with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) are more steerable, especially towards stances associated with political liberals and women, but present significantly less diverse views of personas. We also find variance in LLM steerability that cannot be predicted from multiple-choice opinion evaluation. Our results show the importance of evaluating models in open-ended text generation, as it can surface new LLM opinion biases. Moreover, such a setup can shed light on our ability to steer models toward a richer and more diverse range of viewpoints.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown great progress in responding to user questions, allowing for a multitude of diverse applications. Yet, the quality of LLM outputs heavily depends on the prompt design, where a good prompt might enable the LLM to answer a very challenging question correctly. Therefore, recent works have developed many strategies for improving the prompt, including both manual crafting and in-domain optimization. However, their efficacy in unrestricted scenarios remains questionable, as the former depends on human design for specific questions and the latter usually generalizes poorly to unseen scenarios. To address these problems, we give LLMs the freedom to design the best prompts according to themselves. Specifically, we include a hierarchy of LLMs, first constructing a prompt with precise instructions and accurate wording in a hierarchical manner, and then using this prompt to generate the final answer to the user query. We term this pipeline Hierarchical Multi-Agent Workflow, or HMAW. In contrast with prior works, HMAW imposes no human restriction and requires no training, and is completely task-agnostic while capable of adjusting to the nuances of the underlying task. Through both quantitative and qualitative experiments across multiple benchmarks, we verify that despite its simplicity, the proposed approach can create detailed and suitable prompts, further boosting the performance of current LLMs.
Knowledge editing aims to change language models' performance on several special cases (i.e., editing scope) by infusing the corresponding expected knowledge into them. With the recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), knowledge editing has been shown as a promising technique to adapt LLMs to new knowledge without retraining from scratch. However, most of the previous studies neglect the multi-lingual nature of some main-stream LLMs (e.g., LLaMA, ChatGPT and GPT-4), and typically focus on monolingual scenarios, where LLMs are edited and evaluated in the same language. As a result, it is still unknown the effect of source language editing on a different target language. In this paper, we aim to figure out this cross-lingual effect in knowledge editing. Specifically, we first collect a large-scale cross-lingual synthetic dataset by translating ZsRE from English to Chinese. Then, we conduct English editing on various knowledge editing methods covering different paradigms, and evaluate their performance in Chinese, and vice versa. To give deeper analyses of the cross-lingual effect, the evaluation includes four aspects, i.e., reliability, generality, locality and portability. Furthermore, we analyze the inconsistent behaviors of the edited models and discuss their specific challenges. Data and codes are available at //github.com/krystalan/Bi_ZsRE
Recent years have witnessed the deployment of code language models (LMs) in various code intelligence tasks such as code completion. Yet, it is challenging for pre-trained LMs to generate correct completions in private repositories. Previous studies retrieve cross-file context based on import relations or text similarity, which is insufficiently relevant to completion targets. In this paper, we propose a dataflow-guided retrieval augmentation approach, called DraCo, for repository-level code completion. DraCo parses a private repository into code entities and establishes their relations through an extended dataflow analysis, forming a repo-specific context graph. Whenever triggering code completion, DraCo precisely retrieves relevant background knowledge from the repo-specific context graph and generates well-formed prompts to query code LMs. Furthermore, we construct a large Python dataset, ReccEval, with more diverse completion targets. Our experiments demonstrate the superior accuracy and applicable efficiency of DraCo, improving code exact match by 3.43% and identifier F1-score by 3.27% on average compared to the state-of-the-art approach.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.