The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has triggered legal and ethical concerns, especially regarding the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials in their training datasets. This has led to lawsuits against tech companies accused of using protected content without permission. Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) aim to detect whether specific documents were used in a given LLM pretraining, but their effectiveness is undermined by biases such as time-shifts and n-gram overlaps. This paper addresses the evaluation of MIAs on LLMs with partially inferable training sets, under the ex-post hypothesis, which acknowledges inherent distributional biases between members and non-members datasets. We propose and validate algorithms to create ``non-biased'' and ``non-classifiable'' datasets for fairer MIA assessment. Experiments using the Gutenberg dataset on OpenLamma and Pythia show that neutralizing known biases alone is insufficient. Our methods produce non-biased ex-post datasets with AUC-ROC scores comparable to those previously obtained on genuinely random datasets, validating our approach. Globally, MIAs yield results close to random, with only one being effective on both random and our datasets, but its performance decreases when bias is removed.
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has significantly transformed both the construction and application of information retrieval (IR) systems. However, current interactions between IR systems and LLMs remain limited, with LLMs merely serving as part of components within IR systems, and IR systems being constructed independently of LLMs. This separated architecture restricts knowledge sharing and deep collaboration between them. In this paper, we introduce Self-Retrieval, a novel end-to-end LLM-driven information retrieval architecture. Self-Retrieval unifies all essential IR functions within a single LLM, leveraging the inherent capabilities of LLMs throughout the IR process. Specifically, Self-Retrieval internalizes the retrieval corpus through self-supervised learning, transforms the retrieval process into sequential passage generation, and performs relevance assessment for reranking. Experimental results demonstrate that Self-Retrieval not only outperforms existing retrieval approaches by a significant margin, but also substantially enhances the performance of LLM-driven downstream applications like retrieval-augmented generation.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks, including language modeling, understanding, and generation. However, the increased memory and computational costs associated with these models pose significant challenges for deployment on resource-limited devices. Structural pruning has emerged as a promising solution to reduce the costs of LLMs without requiring post-processing steps. Prior structural pruning methods either follow the dependence of structures at the cost of limiting flexibility, or introduce non-trivial additional parameters by incorporating different projection matrices. In this work, we propose a novel approach that relaxes the constraint imposed by regular structural pruning methods and eliminates the structural dependence along the embedding dimension. Our dimension-independent structural pruning method offers several benefits. Firstly, our method enables different blocks to utilize different subsets of the feature maps. Secondly, by removing structural dependence, we facilitate each block to possess varying widths along its input and output dimensions, thereby significantly enhancing the flexibility of structural pruning. We evaluate our method on various LLMs, including OPT, LLaMA, LLaMA-2, Phi-1.5, and Phi-2. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, showing for the first time that structural pruning can achieve an accuracy similar to semi-structural pruning.
Alongside the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been a notable increase in efforts to integrate LLM techniques in information retrieval (IR) and search engines (SE). Recently, an additional post-ranking stage is suggested in SE to enhance user satisfaction in practical applications. Nevertheless, research dedicated to enhancing the post-ranking stage through LLMs remains largely unexplored. In this study, we introduce a novel paradigm named Large Language Models for Post-Ranking in search engine (LLM4PR), which leverages the capabilities of LLMs to accomplish the post-ranking task in SE. Concretely, a Query-Instructed Adapter (QIA) module is designed to derive the user/item representation vectors by incorporating their heterogeneous features. A feature adaptation step is further introduced to align the semantics of user/item representations with the LLM. Finally, the LLM4PR integrates a learning to post-rank step, leveraging both a main task and an auxiliary task to fine-tune the model to adapt the post-ranking task. Experiment studies demonstrate that the proposed framework leads to significant improvements and exhibits state-of-the-art performance compared with other alternatives.
Since the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success, understanding and rectifying their internal complex mechanisms has become an urgent issue. Recent research has attempted to interpret their behaviors through the lens of inner representation. However, developing practical and efficient methods for applying these representations for general and flexible model editing remains challenging. In this work, we explore how to leverage insights from representation engineering to guide the editing of LLMs by deploying a representation sensor as an editing oracle. We first identify the importance of a robust and reliable sensor during editing, then propose an Adversarial Representation Engineering (ARE) framework to provide a unified and interpretable approach for conceptual model editing without compromising baseline performance. Experiments on multiple tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of ARE in various model editing scenarios. Our code and data are available at //github.com/Zhang-Yihao/Adversarial-Representation-Engineering.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities on complex tasks, but they still suffer from out-of-date knowledge, hallucinations, and opaque decision-making. In contrast, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) can provide explicit and editable knowledge for LLMs to alleviate these issues. Existing paradigm of KG-augmented LLM manually predefines the breadth of exploration space and requires flawless navigation in KGs. However, this paradigm cannot adaptively explore reasoning paths in KGs based on the question semantics and self-correct erroneous reasoning paths, resulting in a bottleneck in efficiency and effect. To address these limitations, we propose a novel self-correcting adaptive planning paradigm for KG-augmented LLM named Plan-on-Graph (PoG), which first decomposes the question into several sub-objectives and then repeats the process of adaptively exploring reasoning paths, updating memory, and reflecting on the need to self-correct erroneous reasoning paths until arriving at the answer. Specifically, three important mechanisms of Guidance, Memory, and Reflection are designed to work together, to guarantee the adaptive breadth of self-correcting planning for graph reasoning. Finally, extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of PoG.
Offline evaluation of LLMs is crucial in understanding their capacities, though current methods remain underexplored in existing research. In this work, we focus on the offline evaluation of the chain-of-thought capabilities and show how to optimize LLMs based on the proposed evaluation method. To enable offline feedback with rich knowledge and reasoning paths, we use knowledge graphs (e.g., Wikidata5m) to provide feedback on the generated chain of thoughts. Due to the heterogeneity between LLM reasoning and KG structures, direct interaction and feedback from KGs on LLM behavior are challenging, as they require accurate entity linking and grounding of LLM-generated chains of thought in the KG. To address the above challenge, we propose an offline chain-of-thought evaluation framework, OCEAN, which models chain-of-thought reasoning in LLMs as an MDP and evaluate the policy's alignment with KG preference modeling. To overcome the reasoning heterogeneity and grounding problems, we leverage on-policy KG exploration and RL to model a KG policy that generates token-level likelihood distributions for LLM-generated chain-of-thought reasoning paths, simulating KG reasoning preference. Then we incorporate the knowledge-graph feedback on the validity and alignment of the generated reasoning paths into inverse propensity scores and propose KG-IPS estimator. Theoretically, we prove the unbiasedness of the proposed KG-IPS estimator and provide a lower bound on its variance. With the off-policy evaluated value function, we can directly enable off-policy optimization to further enhance chain-of-thought alignment. Our empirical study shows that OCEAN can be efficiently optimized for generating chain-of-thought reasoning paths with higher estimated values without affecting LLMs' general abilities in downstream tasks or their internal knowledge.
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted considerable attention due to their biologically inspired, event-driven nature, making them highly suitable for neuromorphic hardware. Time-to-First-Spike (TTFS) coding, where neurons fire only once during inference, offers the benefits of reduced spike counts, enhanced energy efficiency, and faster processing. However, SNNs employing TTFS coding often suffer from diminished classification accuracy. This paper presents an efficient training framework for TTFS that not only improves accuracy but also accelerates the training process. Unlike most previous approaches, we first identify two key issues limiting the performance of TTFS neurons: information disminishing and imbalanced membrane potential distribution. To address these challenges, we propose a novel initialization strategy. Additionally, we introduce a temporal weighting decoding method that aggregates temporal outputs through a weighted sum, supporting BPTT. Moreover, we re-evaluate the pooling layer in TTFS neurons and find that average pooling is better suited than max-pooling for this coding scheme. Our experimental results show that the proposed training framework leads to more stable training and significant performance improvements, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on both the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets.
Generating executable code from natural language instructions using Large Language Models (LLMs) poses challenges such as semantic ambiguity and understanding taskspecific contexts. To address these issues, we propose a system called DemoCraft, which enhances code generation by leveraging in-context learning and demonstration selection, combined with latent concept learning. Latent concept learning introduces additional concept tokens, which are trainable embeddings that capture task-specific knowledge. We then test our system on two major datasets: MBPP and Humaneval. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves an approximate 2x increase in the pass@k metric compared to baseline models. Furthermore, we introduce two novel evaluation metrics: correctness@k and similarity@k. Our empirical studies indicate that our system attains nearly a 3x improvement in these metrics as well.
Text-to-SQL parsing involves the translation of natural language queries (NLQs) into their corresponding SQL commands. A principal challenge within this domain is the formulation of SQL queries that are not only syntactically correct but also semantically aligned with the natural language input. However, the intrinsic disparity between the NLQ and the SQL poses a significant challenge. In this research, we introduce Keyword Instruction (KeyInst), a novel method designed to enhance SQL formulation by Large Language Models (LLMs). KeyInst essentially provides guidance on pivotal SQL keywords likely to be part of the final query, thus facilitates a smoother SQL query formulation process. We explore two strategies for integrating KeyInst into Text-to-SQL parsing: a pipeline strategy and a single-pass strategy. The former first generates KeyInst for question, which are then used to prompt LLMs. The latter employs a fine-tuned model to concurrently generate KeyInst and SQL in one step. We developed StrucQL, a benchmark specifically designed for the evaluation of SQL formulation. Extensive experiments on StrucQL and other benchmarks demonstrate that KeyInst significantly improves upon the existing Text-to-SQL prompting techniques.
The problem of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) consists in following the trajectory of different objects in a sequence, usually a video. In recent years, with the rise of Deep Learning, the algorithms that provide a solution to this problem have benefited from the representational power of deep models. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on works that employ Deep Learning models to solve the task of MOT on single-camera videos. Four main steps in MOT algorithms are identified, and an in-depth review of how Deep Learning was employed in each one of these stages is presented. A complete experimental comparison of the presented works on the three MOTChallenge datasets is also provided, identifying a number of similarities among the top-performing methods and presenting some possible future research directions.