Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. However, such impressive capability typically comes with a substantial model size, which presents significant challenges in both the deployment, inference, and training stages. With LLM being a general-purpose task solver, we explore its compression in a task-agnostic manner, which aims to preserve the multi-task solving and language generation ability of the original LLM. One challenge to achieving this is the enormous size of the training corpus of LLM, which makes both data transfer and model post-training over-burdensome. Thus, we tackle the compression of LLMs within the bound of two constraints: being task-agnostic and minimizing the reliance on the original training dataset. Our method, named LLM-Pruner, adopts structural pruning that selectively removes non-critical coupled structures based on gradient information, maximally preserving the majority of the LLM's functionality. To this end, the performance of pruned models can be efficiently recovered through tuning techniques, LoRA, in merely 3 hours, requiring only 50K data. We validate the LLM-Pruner on three LLMs, including LLaMA, Vicuna, and ChatGLM, and demonstrate that the compressed models still exhibit satisfactory capabilities in zero-shot classification and generation. The code is available at: //github.com/horseee/LLM-Pruner
Large language models (LLMs) with chat-based capabilities, such as ChatGPT, are widely used in various workflows. However, due to a limited understanding of these large-scale models, users struggle to use this technology and experience different kinds of dissatisfaction. Researchers have introduced several methods such as prompt engineering to improve model responses. However, they focus on crafting one prompt, and little has been investigated on how to deal with the dissatisfaction the user encountered during the conversation. Therefore, with ChatGPT as the case study, we examine end users' dissatisfaction along with their strategies to address the dissatisfaction. After organizing users' dissatisfaction with LLM into seven categories based on a literature review, we collected 511 instances of dissatisfactory ChatGPT responses from 107 users and their detailed recollections of dissatisfied experiences, which we release as a publicly accessible dataset. Our analysis reveals that users most frequently experience dissatisfaction when ChatGPT fails to grasp their intentions, while they rate the severity of dissatisfaction the highest with dissatisfaction related to accuracy. We also identified four tactics users employ to address their dissatisfaction and their effectiveness. We found that users often do not use any tactics to address their dissatisfaction, and even when using tactics, 72% of dissatisfaction remained unresolved. Moreover, we found that users with low knowledge regarding LLMs tend to face more dissatisfaction on accuracy while they often put minimal effort in addressing dissatisfaction. Based on these findings, we propose design implications for minimizing user dissatisfaction and enhancing the usability of chat-based LLM services.
The recent emergence of large language models (LLMs) have attracted considerable attention. LLMs may interact with users in the form of dialogue and generate responses following their instructions, which naturally require dialogue comprehension abilities. Without correct comprehension of the dialogue, the model may inevitably generate incorrect responses. However, dialogue comprehension is a general language ability which is hard to be evaluated directly. In this work, we propose to perform the evaluation with the help of the dialogue summarization task. Beside evaluating and analyzing the dialogue summarization performance (DIAC-Sum), we also derive factual questions from the generated summaries and use them as a more flexible measurement of dialogue comprehension (DIAC-FactQA). Our evaluation shows that, on average, 27% of the summaries generated by LLMs contain factual inconsistency. Even ChatGPT, the strongest evaluated model, has such errors in 16% of its summaries. For answering the factual questions, which is more challenging, the average accuracy of all evaluated LLMs is only 62.8%. Both results indicate serious deficiencies. Detailed analysis shows that the understanding of subject/object of the conversation is still the most challenging problem for LLMs. Furthermore, to stimulate and enhance the dialogue comprehension ability of LLMs, we propose a fine-tuning paradigm with auto-constructed multi-task data. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieved an accuracy improvement of 8.9% on DIAC-FactQA.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across various natural language tasks. However, evaluating their alignment with human preferences remains a challenge. To this end, we propose a comprehensive human evaluation framework to assess LLMs' proficiency in following instructions on diverse real-world tasks. We construct a hierarchical task tree encompassing 7 major areas covering over 200 categories and over 800 tasks, which covers diverse capabilities such as question answering, reasoning, multiturn dialogue, and text generation, to evaluate LLMs in a comprehensive and in-depth manner. We also design detailed evaluation standards and processes to facilitate consistent, unbiased judgments from human evaluators. A test set of over 3,000 instances is released, spanning different difficulty levels and knowledge domains. Our work provides a standardized methodology to evaluate human alignment in LLMs for both English and Chinese. We also analyze the feasibility of automating parts of evaluation with a strong LLM (GPT-4). Our framework supports a thorough assessment of LLMs as they are integrated into real-world applications. We have made publicly available the task tree, TencentLLMEval dataset, and evaluation methodology which have been demonstrated as effective in assessing the performance of Tencent Hunyuan LLMs. By doing so, we aim to facilitate the benchmarking of advances in the development of safe and human-aligned LLMs.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in natural language understanding and generation, making them valuable tools for enhancing conversational interactions. However, LLMs encounter challenges such as lacking multi-step reasoning capabilities, and heavy reliance on prompts. In this regard, we introduce a prompt-refinement system named PromptMind, also known as "Prompt Your Mind", to provide an automated solution for generating contextually relevant prompts during conversations. PromptMind enhances the overall interaction between humans and chatbots through an automatic prompt suggestion and an automatic prompt refinement. To assess the effectiveness of PromptMind, we designed three interaction tasks to evaluate emotional support, advice acquisition, and task-oriented interactions during human-chatbot interactions. The results demonstrated that PromptMind reduced mental demands during interactions and fostered enhanced performance and social connections between users and chatbots. In summary, our findings indicate that PromptMind acts as a bridge, facilitating smoother information exchange and enhancing the usability of chatbot interactions.
Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have achieved substantial attention due to their impressive human language understanding and generation capabilities. Therefore, the application of LLMs in medicine to assist physicians and patient care emerges as a promising research direction in both artificial intelligence and clinical medicine. To this end, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current progress, applications, and challenges faced by LLMs in medicine. Specifically, we aim to address the following questions: 1) What are LLMs and how can medical LLMs be built? 2) What are the downstream performances of medical LLMs? 3) How can medical LLMs be utilized in real-world clinical practice? 4) What challenges arise from the use of medical LLMs? 5) How can we better construct and utilize medical LLMs? As a result, this survey aims to provide insights into the opportunities and challenges of LLMs in medicine and serve as a valuable resource for constructing practical and effective medical LLMs. A regularly updated list of practical guide resources of medical LLMs can be found at //github.com/AI-in-Health/MedLLMsPracticalGuide.
Large language models (LLMs) are proficient at generating fluent text with minimal task-specific supervision. Yet, their ability to provide well-grounded rationalizations for knowledge-intensive tasks remains under-explored. Such tasks, like commonsense multiple-choice questions, require rationales based on world knowledge to support predictions and refute alternate options. We consider the task of generating knowledge-guided rationalization in natural language by using expert-written examples in a few-shot manner. Surprisingly, crowd-workers preferred knowledge-grounded rationales over crowdsourced rationalizations, citing their factuality, sufficiency, and comprehensive refutations. Although LLMs-generated rationales were preferable, further improvements in conciseness and novelty are required. In another study, we show how rationalization of incorrect model predictions erodes humans' trust in LLM-generated rationales. Motivated by these observations, we create a two-stage pipeline to review task predictions and eliminate potential incorrect decisions before rationalization, enabling trustworthy rationale generation.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing. However, their internal mechanisms are still unclear and this lack of transparency poses unwanted risks for downstream applications. Therefore, understanding and explaining these models is crucial for elucidating their behaviors, limitations, and social impacts. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy of explainability techniques and provide a structured overview of methods for explaining Transformer-based language models. We categorize techniques based on the training paradigms of LLMs: traditional fine-tuning-based paradigm and prompting-based paradigm. For each paradigm, we summarize the goals and dominant approaches for generating local explanations of individual predictions and global explanations of overall model knowledge. We also discuss metrics for evaluating generated explanations, and discuss how explanations can be leveraged to debug models and improve performance. Lastly, we examine key challenges and emerging opportunities for explanation techniques in the era of LLMs in comparison to conventional machine learning models.
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.
Transformer-based pretrained language models (T-PTLMs) have achieved great success in almost every NLP task. The evolution of these models started with GPT and BERT. These models are built on the top of transformers, self-supervised learning and transfer learning. Transformed-based PTLMs learn universal language representations from large volumes of text data using self-supervised learning and transfer this knowledge to downstream tasks. These models provide good background knowledge to downstream tasks which avoids training of downstream models from scratch. In this comprehensive survey paper, we initially give a brief overview of self-supervised learning. Next, we explain various core concepts like pretraining, pretraining methods, pretraining tasks, embeddings and downstream adaptation methods. Next, we present a new taxonomy of T-PTLMs and then give brief overview of various benchmarks including both intrinsic and extrinsic. We present a summary of various useful libraries to work with T-PTLMs. Finally, we highlight some of the future research directions which will further improve these models. We strongly believe that this comprehensive survey paper will serve as a good reference to learn the core concepts as well as to stay updated with the recent happenings in T-PTLMs.
Many natural language processing tasks solely rely on sparse dependencies between a few tokens in a sentence. Soft attention mechanisms show promising performance in modeling local/global dependencies by soft probabilities between every two tokens, but they are not effective and efficient when applied to long sentences. By contrast, hard attention mechanisms directly select a subset of tokens but are difficult and inefficient to train due to their combinatorial nature. In this paper, we integrate both soft and hard attention into one context fusion model, "reinforced self-attention (ReSA)", for the mutual benefit of each other. In ReSA, a hard attention trims a sequence for a soft self-attention to process, while the soft attention feeds reward signals back to facilitate the training of the hard one. For this purpose, we develop a novel hard attention called "reinforced sequence sampling (RSS)", selecting tokens in parallel and trained via policy gradient. Using two RSS modules, ReSA efficiently extracts the sparse dependencies between each pair of selected tokens. We finally propose an RNN/CNN-free sentence-encoding model, "reinforced self-attention network (ReSAN)", solely based on ReSA. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) and Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK) datasets.