Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks rely on labeled data to train machine learning models to achieve high performance. However, data annotation can be a time-consuming and expensive process, especially when the task involves a large amount of data or requires specialized domains. Recently, GPT-3.5 series models have demonstrated remarkable few-shot and zero-shot ability across various NLP tasks. In this paper, we first claim that large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5, can serve as an excellent crowdsourced annotator by providing them with sufficient guidance and demonstrated examples. To make LLMs to be better annotators, we propose a two-step approach, 'explain-then-annotate'. To be more precise, we begin by creating prompts for every demonstrated example, which we subsequently utilize to prompt a LLM to provide an explanation for why the specific ground truth answer/label was chosen for that particular example. Following this, we construct the few-shot chain-of-thought prompt with the self-generated explanation and employ it to annotate the unlabeled data. We conduct experiments on three tasks, including user input and keyword relevance assessment, BoolQ and WiC. The annotation results from GPT-3.5 surpasses those from crowdsourced annotation for user input and keyword relevance assessment. Additionally, for the other two tasks, GPT-3.5 achieves results that are comparable to those obtained through crowdsourced annotation.
In the domain of audio processing, Transfer Learning has facilitated the rise of Self-Supervised Learning and Zero-Shot Learning techniques. These approaches have led to the development of versatile models capable of tackling a wide array of tasks, while delivering state-of-the-art performance. However, current models inherently lack the capacity to produce the requisite language for open-ended tasks, such as Audio Captioning or Audio Question & Answering. We introduce Pengi, a novel Audio Language Model that leverages Transfer Learning by framing all audio tasks as text-generation tasks. It takes as input, an audio recording, and text, and generates free-form text as output. The input audio is represented as a sequence of continuous embeddings by an audio encoder. A text encoder does the same for the corresponding text input. Both sequences are combined as a prefix to prompt a pre-trained frozen language model. The unified architecture of Pengi enables open-ended tasks and close-ended tasks without any additional fine-tuning or task-specific extensions. When evaluated on 22 downstream tasks, our approach yields state-of-the-art performance in several of them. Our results show that connecting language models with audio models is a major step towards general-purpose audio understanding
Large Language Model (LLM) has gained popularity and achieved remarkable results in open-domain tasks, but its performance in real industrial domain-specific scenarios is average since there is no specific knowledge in it. This issue has attracted widespread attention, but there are few relevant benchmarks available. In this paper, we provide a benchmark Question Answering (QA) dataset named MSQA, which is about Microsoft products and IT technical problems encountered by customers. This dataset contains industry cloud-specific QA knowledge, which is not available for general LLM, so it is well suited for evaluating methods aimed at improving domain-specific capabilities of LLM. In addition, we propose a new model interaction paradigm that can empower LLM to achieve better performance on domain-specific tasks where it is not proficient. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the approach following our model fusion framework outperforms the commonly used LLM with retrieval methods.
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks depends heavily on prompt design, with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and self-consistency being critical methods that enhance this ability. However, these methods do not fully exploit the answers generated by the LLM to guide subsequent responses. This paper proposes a new prompting method, named Progressive-Hint Prompting (PHP), that enables automatic multiple interactions between users and LLMs by using previously generated answers as hints to progressively guide toward the correct answers. PHP is orthogonal to CoT and self-consistency, making it easy to combine with state-of-the-art techniques to further improve performance. We conducted extensive and comprehensive experiments on seven benchmarks. The results show that PHP significantly improves accuracy while remaining highly efficient. For instance, with text-davinci-003, we observed a 4.2% improvement on GSM8K with greedy decoding compared to Complex CoT, and a 46.17% reduction in sample paths with self-consistency. With GPT-4 and PHP, we achieve state-of-the-art performances on SVAMP (89.1% -> 91.9%), GSM8K (92% -> 95.5%), AQuA (76.4% -> 79.9%) and MATH (50.3% -> 53.9%).
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in performing complex tasks. Moreover, recent research has shown that incorporating human-annotated rationales (e.g., Chain-of- Thought prompting) during in-context learning can significantly enhance the performance of these models, particularly on tasks that require reasoning capabilities. However, incorporating such rationales poses challenges in terms of scalability as this requires a high degree of human involvement. In this work, we present a novel framework, Amplifying Model Performance by Leveraging In-Context Learning with Post Hoc Explanations (AMPLIFY), which addresses the aforementioned challenges by automating the process of rationale generation. To this end, we leverage post hoc explanation methods which output attribution scores (explanations) capturing the influence of each of the input features on model predictions. More specifically, we construct automated natural language rationales that embed insights from post hoc explanations to provide corrective signals to LLMs. Extensive experimentation with real-world datasets demonstrates that our framework, AMPLIFY, leads to prediction accuracy improvements of about 10-25% over a wide range of tasks, including those where prior approaches which rely on human-annotated rationales such as Chain-of-Thought prompting fall short. Our work makes one of the first attempts at highlighting the potential of post hoc explanations as valuable tools for enhancing the effectiveness of LLMs. Furthermore, we conduct additional empirical analyses and ablation studies to demonstrate the impact of each of the components of AMPLIFY, which, in turn, lead to critical insights for refining in-context learning.
In this paper, we take the initiative to investigate the performance of LLMs on complex planning tasks that require LLMs to understand a virtual spatial environment simulated via natural language and act correspondingly in text. We propose a benchmark named Natural Language Planning (NLP) composed of a set of novel tasks: Brick World, NLVR-based Manipulations, and Natural Language Navigation. We found that current popular LLMs such as ChatGPT still lack abilities in complex planning. This arises a question -- do the LLMs have a good understanding of the environments described in natural language, or maybe other alternatives such as symbolic representations are neater and hence better to be understood by LLMs? To this end, we propose a novel method called CoS (Chain-of-Symbol Prompting) that represents the complex environments with condensed symbolic spatial representations during the chained intermediate thinking steps. CoS is easy to use and does not need additional training on LLMs. Extensive experiments indicate that CoS clearly surpasses the performance of the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting in all three planning tasks with even fewer tokens used in the inputs compared with CoT on ChatGPT and InstructGPT. The performance gain is strong, by up to 60.8% accuracy (from 31.8% to 92.6%) on Brick World for ChatGPT. CoS also reduces the number of tokens in the prompt obviously, by up to 65.8% of the tokens (from 407 to 139) for the intermediate steps from demonstrations on Brick World.
The MultiCoNER \RNum{2} shared task aims to tackle multilingual named entity recognition (NER) in fine-grained and noisy scenarios, and it inherits the semantic ambiguity and low-context setting of the MultiCoNER \RNum{1} task. To cope with these problems, the previous top systems in the MultiCoNER \RNum{1} either incorporate the knowledge bases or gazetteers. However, they still suffer from insufficient knowledge, limited context length, single retrieval strategy. In this paper, our team \textbf{DAMO-NLP} proposes a unified retrieval-augmented system (U-RaNER) for fine-grained multilingual NER. We perform error analysis on the previous top systems and reveal that their performance bottleneck lies in insufficient knowledge. Also, we discover that the limited context length causes the retrieval knowledge to be invisible to the model. To enhance the retrieval context, we incorporate the entity-centric Wikidata knowledge base, while utilizing the infusion approach to broaden the contextual scope of the model. Also, we explore various search strategies and refine the quality of retrieval knowledge. Our system\footnote{We will release the dataset, code, and scripts of our system at {\small \url{//github.com/modelscope/AdaSeq/tree/master/examples/U-RaNER}}.} wins 9 out of 13 tracks in the MultiCoNER \RNum{2} shared task. Additionally, we compared our system with ChatGPT, one of the large language models which have unlocked strong capabilities on many tasks. The results show that there is still much room for improvement for ChatGPT on the extraction task.
Converting text into the structured query language (Text2SQL) is a research hotspot in the field of natural language processing (NLP), which has broad application prospects. In the era of big data, the use of databases has penetrated all walks of life, in which the collected data is large in scale, diverse in variety, and wide in scope, making the data query cumbersome and inefficient, and putting forward higher requirements for the Text2SQL model. In practical applications, the current mainstream end-to-end Text2SQL model is not only difficult to build due to its complex structure and high requirements for training data, but also difficult to adjust due to massive parameters. In addition, the accuracy of the model is hard to achieve the desired result. Based on this, this paper proposes a pipelined Text2SQL method: SPSQL. This method disassembles the Text2SQL task into four subtasks--table selection, column selection, SQL generation, and value filling, which can be converted into a text classification problem, a sequence labeling problem, and two text generation problems, respectively. Then, we construct data formats of different subtasks based on existing data and improve the accuracy of the overall model by improving the accuracy of each submodel. We also use the named entity recognition module and data augmentation to optimize the overall model. We construct the dataset based on the marketing business data of the State Grid Corporation of China. Experiments demonstrate our proposed method achieves the best performance compared with the end-to-end method and other pipeline methods.
Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging because they are memory inefficient and compute-intensive for practical applications. In reaction, researchers train smaller task-specific models by either finetuning with human labels or distilling using LLM-generated labels. However, finetuning and distillation require large amounts of training data to achieve comparable performance to LLMs. We introduce Distilling step-by-step, a new mechanism that (a) trains smaller models that outperform LLMs, and (b) achieves so by leveraging less training data needed by finetuning or distillation. Our method extracts LLM rationales as additional supervision for small models within a multi-task training framework. We present three findings across 4 NLP benchmarks: First, compared to both finetuning and distillation, our mechanism achieves better performance with much fewer labeled/unlabeled training examples. Second, compared to LLMs, we achieve better performance using substantially smaller model sizes. Third, we reduce both the model size and the amount of data required to outperform LLMs; our 770M T5 model outperforms the 540B PaLM model using only 80% of available data on a benchmark task.
The Pretrained Foundation Models (PFMs) are regarded as the foundation for various downstream tasks with different data modalities. A pretrained foundation model, such as BERT, GPT-3, MAE, DALLE-E, and ChatGPT, is trained on large-scale data which provides a reasonable parameter initialization for a wide range of downstream applications. The idea of pretraining behind PFMs plays an important role in the application of large models. Different from previous methods that apply convolution and recurrent modules for feature extractions, the generative pre-training (GPT) method applies Transformer as the feature extractor and is trained on large datasets with an autoregressive paradigm. Similarly, the BERT apples transformers to train on large datasets as a contextual language model. Recently, the ChatGPT shows promising success on large language models, which applies an autoregressive language model with zero shot or few show prompting. With the extraordinary success of PFMs, AI has made waves in a variety of fields over the past few years. Considerable methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics have been proposed in the literature, the need is raising for an updated survey. This study provides a comprehensive review of recent research advancements, current and future challenges, and opportunities for PFMs in text, image, graph, as well as other data modalities. We first review the basic components and existing pretraining in natural language processing, computer vision, and graph learning. We then discuss other advanced PFMs for other data modalities and unified PFMs considering the data quality and quantity. Besides, we discuss relevant research about the fundamentals of the PFM, including model efficiency and compression, security, and privacy. Finally, we lay out key implications, future research directions, challenges, and open problems.
The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF--better few-shot fine-tuning of language models--a suite of simple and complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together with a novel pipeline for automating prompt generation; and (2) a refined strategy for dynamically and selectively incorporating demonstrations into each context. Finally, we present a systematic evaluation for analyzing few-shot performance on a range of NLP tasks, including classification and regression. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods combine to dramatically outperform standard fine-tuning procedures in this low resource setting, achieving up to 30% absolute improvement, and 11% on average across all tasks. Our approach makes minimal assumptions on task resources and domain expertise, and hence constitutes a strong task-agnostic method for few-shot learning.