Large language models (LLMs) have exploded in popularity due to their new generative capabilities that go far beyond prior state-of-the-art. These technologies are increasingly being leveraged in various domains such as law, finance, and medicine. However, these models carry significant computational challenges, especially the compute and energy costs required for inference. Inference energy costs already receive less attention than the energy costs of training LLMs -- despite how often these large models are called on to conduct inference in reality (e.g., ChatGPT). As these state-of-the-art LLMs see increasing usage and deployment in various domains, a better understanding of their resource utilization is crucial for cost-savings, scaling performance, efficient hardware usage, and optimal inference strategies. In this paper, we describe experiments conducted to study the computational and energy utilization of inference with LLMs. We benchmark and conduct a preliminary analysis of the inference performance and inference energy costs of different sizes of LLaMA -- a recent state-of-the-art LLM -- developed by Meta AI on two generations of popular GPUs (NVIDIA V100 \& A100) and two datasets (Alpaca and GSM8K) to reflect the diverse set of tasks/benchmarks for LLMs in research and practice. We present the results of multi-node, multi-GPU inference using model sharding across up to 32 GPUs. To our knowledge, our work is the one of the first to study LLM inference performance from the perspective of computational and energy resources at this scale.
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and GPT-4 have opened up new opportunities for text analysis in political science. They promise automation with better results and less programming. In this study, we evaluate LLMs on three original coding tasks of non-English political science texts, and we provide a detailed description of a general workflow for using LLMs for text coding in political science research. Our use case offers a practical guide for researchers looking to incorporate LLMs into their research on text analysis. We find that, when provided with detailed label definitions and coding examples, an LLM can be as good as or even better than a human annotator while being much faster (up to hundreds of times), considerably cheaper (costing up to 60% less than human coding), and much easier to scale to large amounts of text. Overall, LLMs present a viable option for most text coding projects.
Despite the significant progress made in practical applications of aligned language models (LMs), they tend to be overconfident in output answers compared to the corresponding pre-trained LMs. In this work, we systematically evaluate the impact of the alignment process on logit-based uncertainty calibration of LMs under the multiple-choice setting. We first conduct a thoughtful empirical study on how aligned LMs differ in calibration from their pre-trained counterparts. Experimental results reveal that there are two distinct uncertainties in LMs under the multiple-choice setting, which are responsible for the answer decision and the format preference of the LMs, respectively. Then, we investigate the role of these two uncertainties on aligned LM's calibration through fine-tuning in simple synthetic alignment schemes and conclude that one reason for aligned LMs' overconfidence is the conflation of these two types of uncertainty. Furthermore, we examine the utility of common post-hoc calibration methods for aligned LMs and propose an easy-to-implement and sample-efficient method to calibrate aligned LMs. We hope our findings could provide insights into the design of more reliable alignment processes for LMs.
Recent studies have adopted pre-trained language models, such as CodeT5 and CodeGPT, for automated program generation tasks like code generation, repair, and translation. Numerous language model-based approaches have been proposed and evaluated on various benchmark datasets, demonstrating promising performance. However, there is still uncertainty about the reliability of these models, particularly their realistic ability to consistently transform code sequences. This raises the question: are these techniques sufficiently trustworthy for automated program generation? Consequently, Further research is needed to understand model logic and assess reliability and explainability. To bridge these research gaps, we conduct a thorough empirical study of eight popular language models on five representative datasets to determine the capabilities and limitations of automated program generation approaches. We further employ advanced explainable AI approaches to highlight the tokens that significantly contribute to the code transformation. We discover that state-of-the-art approaches suffer from inappropriate performance evaluation stemming from severe data duplication, causing over-optimistic results. Our explainability analysis reveals that, in various experimental scenarios, language models can recognize code grammar and structural information, but they exhibit limited robustness to changes in input sequences. Overall, more rigorous evaluation approaches and benchmarks are critical to enhance the reliability and explainability of automated program generation moving forward. Our findings provide important guidelines for this goal.
General large language models (LLMs), represented by ChatGPT, have demonstrated significant potential in tasks such as code generation in software engineering. This has led to the development of specialized LLMs for software engineering, known as Code LLMs. A considerable portion of Code LLMs is derived from general LLMs through model fine-tuning. As a result, Code LLMs are often updated frequently and their performance can be influenced by the base LLMs. However, there is currently a lack of systematic investigation into Code LLMs and their performance. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive survey and analysis of the types of Code LLMs and their differences in performance compared to general LLMs. We aim to address three questions: (1) What LLMs are specifically designed for software engineering tasks, and what is the relationship between these Code LLMs? (2) Do Code LLMs really outperform general LLMs in software engineering tasks? (3) Which LLMs are more proficient in different software engineering tasks? To answer these questions, we first collect relevant literature and work from five major databases and open-source communities, resulting in 134 works for analysis. Next, we categorize the Code LLMs based on their publishers and examine their relationships with general LLMs and among themselves. Furthermore, we investigate the performance differences between general LLMs and Code LLMs in various software engineering tasks to demonstrate the impact of base models and Code LLMs. Finally, we comprehensively maintained the performance of LLMs across multiple mainstream benchmarks to identify the best-performing LLMs for each software engineering task. Our research not only assists developers of Code LLMs in choosing base models for the development of more advanced LLMs but also provides insights for practitioners to better understand key improvement directions for Code LLMs.
Users of natural language interfaces, generally powered by Large Language Models (LLMs),often must repeat their preferences each time they make a similar request. To alleviate this, we propose including some of a user's preferences and instructions in natural language -- collectively termed standing instructions -- as additional context for such interfaces. For example, when a user states I'm hungry, their previously expressed preference for Persian food will be automatically added to the LLM prompt, so as to influence the search for relevant restaurants. We develop NLSI, a language-to-program dataset consisting of over 2.4K dialogues spanning 17 domains, where each dialogue is paired with a user profile (a set of users specific standing instructions) and corresponding structured representations (API calls). A key challenge in NLSI is to identify which subset of the standing instructions is applicable to a given dialogue. NLSI contains diverse phenomena, from simple preferences to interdependent instructions such as triggering a hotel search whenever the user is booking tickets to an event. We conduct experiments on NLSI using prompting with large language models and various retrieval approaches, achieving a maximum of 44.7% exact match on API prediction. Our results demonstrate the challenges in identifying the relevant standing instructions and their interpretation into API calls.
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of Natural Language Processing systems, but are computationally expensive. To reduce the cost without sacrificing performance, previous studies have explored various approaches to harness the potential of Small Language Models (SLMs) as cost-effective alternatives to their larger counterparts. Driven by findings that SLMs and LLMs exhibit complementary strengths in a structured knowledge extraction task, this work presents a novel SLM/LLM routing framework designed to improve computational efficiency and enhance task performance. First, exemplar pools are created to represent the types of contexts where each LM provides a more reliable answer, leveraging a sentence embedding fine-tuned so that context similarity is close to dialogue state similarity. Then, during inference, the k-nearest exemplars to the testing instance are retrieved, and the instance is routed according to majority vote. In dialogue state tracking tasks, the proposed routing framework enhances performance substantially compared to relying solely on LLMs, while reducing the computational costs by over 50%.
We present a model of pragmatic language understanding, where utterances are produced and understood by searching for regularized equilibria of signaling games. In this model (which we call ReCo, for Regularized Conventions), speakers and listeners search for contextually appropriate utterance--meaning mappings that are both close to game-theoretically optimal conventions and close to a shared, ''default'' semantics. By characterizing pragmatic communication as equilibrium search, we obtain principled sampling algorithms and formal guarantees about the trade-off between communicative success and naturalness. Across several datasets capturing real and idealized human judgments about pragmatic implicatures, ReCo matches or improves upon predictions made by best response and rational speech act models of language understanding.
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit superior performance on various natural language tasks, but they are susceptible to issues stemming from outdated data and domain-specific limitations. In order to address these challenges, researchers have pursued two primary strategies, knowledge editing and retrieval augmentation, to enhance LLMs by incorporating external information from different aspects. Nevertheless, there is still a notable absence of a comprehensive survey. In this paper, we propose a review to discuss the trends in integration of knowledge and large language models, including taxonomy of methods, benchmarks, and applications. In addition, we conduct an in-depth analysis of different methods and point out potential research directions in the future. We hope this survey offers the community quick access and a comprehensive overview of this research area, with the intention of inspiring future research endeavors.
The advent of large language models marks a revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence. With the unprecedented scale of training and model parameters, the capability of large language models has been dramatically improved, leading to human-like performances in understanding, language synthesizing, and common-sense reasoning, etc. Such a major leap-forward in general AI capacity will change the pattern of how personalization is conducted. For one thing, it will reform the way of interaction between humans and personalization systems. Instead of being a passive medium of information filtering, large language models present the foundation for active user engagement. On top of such a new foundation, user requests can be proactively explored, and user's required information can be delivered in a natural and explainable way. For another thing, it will also considerably expand the scope of personalization, making it grow from the sole function of collecting personalized information to the compound function of providing personalized services. By leveraging large language models as general-purpose interface, the personalization systems may compile user requests into plans, calls the functions of external tools to execute the plans, and integrate the tools' outputs to complete the end-to-end personalization tasks. Today, large language models are still being developed, whereas the application in personalization is largely unexplored. Therefore, we consider it to be the right time to review the challenges in personalization and the opportunities to address them with LLMs. In particular, we dedicate this perspective paper to the discussion of the following aspects: the development and challenges for the existing personalization system, the newly emerged capabilities of large language models, and the potential ways of making use of large language models for personalization.
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.