We observe that pre-trained large language models (LLMs) are capable of autoregressively completing complex token sequences -- from arbitrary ones procedurally generated by probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFG), to more rich spatial patterns found in the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a general AI benchmark, prompted in the style of ASCII art. Surprisingly, pattern completion proficiency can be partially retained even when the sequences are expressed using tokens randomly sampled from the vocabulary. These results suggest that without any additional training, LLMs can serve as general sequence modelers, driven by in-context learning. In this work, we investigate how these zero-shot capabilities may be applied to problems in robotics -- from extrapolating sequences of numbers that represent states over time to complete simple motions, to least-to-most prompting of reward-conditioned trajectories that can discover and represent closed-loop policies (e.g., a stabilizing controller for CartPole). While difficult to deploy today for real systems due to latency, context size limitations, and compute costs, the approach of using LLMs to drive low-level control may provide an exciting glimpse into how the patterns among words could be transferred to actions.
Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have been shown to efficiently integrate natural language with visual information to handle multi-modal tasks. However, MLLMs still face a fundamental limitation of hallucinations, where they tend to generate erroneous or fabricated information. In this paper, we address hallucinations in MLLMs from a novel perspective of representation learning. We first analyzed the representation distribution of textual and visual tokens in MLLM, revealing two important findings: 1) there is a significant gap between textual and visual representations, indicating unsatisfactory cross-modal representation alignment; 2) representations of texts that contain and do not contain hallucinations are entangled, making it challenging to distinguish them. These two observations inspire us with a simple yet effective method to mitigate hallucinations. Specifically, we introduce contrastive learning into MLLMs and use text with hallucination as hard negative examples, naturally bringing representations of non-hallucinative text and visual samples closer while pushing way representations of non-hallucinating and hallucinative text. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively, showing its effectiveness in reducing hallucination occurrences and improving performance across multiple benchmarks. On the MMhal-Bench benchmark, our method obtains a 34.66% /29.5% improvement over the baseline MiniGPT-4/LLaVA.
The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is crucial for the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). One promising approach to achieve this alignment is reinforcement learning from human feedback, which employs a reward model (RM) learned from human preference datasets to guide LLMs in generating text that aligns with human preferences. Through intensive experiments and analysis of reward distribution, this paper finds that preference datasets are diverse from each other, even though they are all proposed to align human preference. Hence, mixing diverse human preference datasets to increase data size for enhancing reward modeling could fail. To address the issue and capture the shared human values from diverse preferences, a new training policy called MORE is introduced, which minimizes preference bias by adaptively adjusting the preference objective across diverse preferences. Experiments with the Pythia-1.4B model and five mixed preference datasets show that MORE achieves superior reward accuracy and lower calibration error, highlighting its ability to leverage diverse human preference data.
Foundation models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), can respond to a wide range of format-free queries without any task-specific data collection or model training, creating various research and application opportunities for the modeling and operation of large-scale power systems. In this paper, we outline how such large foundation model such as GPT-4 are developed, and discuss how they can be leveraged in challenging power and energy system tasks. We first investigate the potential of existing foundation models by validating their performance on four representative tasks across power system domains, including the optimal power flow (OPF), electric vehicle (EV) scheduling, knowledge retrieval for power engineering technical reports, and situation awareness. Our results indicate strong capabilities of such foundation models on boosting the efficiency and reliability of power system operational pipelines. We also provide suggestions and projections on future deployment of foundation models in power system applications.
Recently, text watermarking algorithms for large language models (LLMs) have been proposed to mitigate the potential harms of text generated by LLMs, including fake news and copyright issues. However, current watermark detection algorithms require the secret key used in the watermark generation process, making them susceptible to security breaches and counterfeiting during public detection. To address this limitation, we propose an unforgeable publicly verifiable watermark algorithm that uses two different neural networks for watermark generation and detection, instead of using the same key at both stages. Meanwhile, the token embedding parameters are shared between the generation and detection networks, which makes the detection network achieve a high accuracy very efficiently. Experiments demonstrate that our algorithm attains high detection accuracy and computational efficiency through neural networks with a minimized number of parameters. Subsequent analysis confirms the high complexity involved in forging the watermark from the detection network. Our code and data are available at \href{//github.com/THU-BPM/unforgeable_watermark}{//github.com/THU-BPM/unforgeable\_watermark}.
Idiomatic expression (IE) processing and comprehension have challenged pre-trained language models (PTLMs) because their meanings are non-compositional. Unlike prior works that enable IE comprehension through fine-tuning PTLMs with sentences containing IEs, in this work, we construct IEKG, a commonsense knowledge graph for figurative interpretations of IEs. This extends the established ATOMIC2020 graph, converting PTLMs into knowledge models (KMs) that encode and infer commonsense knowledge related to IE use. Experiments show that various PTLMs can be converted into KMs with IEKG. We verify the quality of IEKG and the ability of the trained KMs with automatic and human evaluation. Through applications in natural language understanding, we show that a PTLM injected with knowledge from IEKG exhibits improved IE comprehension ability and can generalize to IEs unseen during training.
Large language models (LLMs) have the remarkable ability to solve new tasks with just a few examples, but they need access to the right tools. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this problem by retrieving a list of relevant tools for a given task. However, RAG's tool retrieval step requires all the required information to be explicitly present in the query. This is a limitation, as semantic search, the widely adopted tool retrieval method, can fail when the query is incomplete or lacks context. To address this limitation, we propose Context Tuning for RAG, which employs a smart context retrieval system to fetch relevant information that improves both tool retrieval and plan generation. Our lightweight context retrieval model uses numerical, categorical, and habitual usage signals to retrieve and rank context items. Our empirical results demonstrate that context tuning significantly enhances semantic search, achieving a 3.5-fold and 1.5-fold improvement in Recall@K for context retrieval and tool retrieval tasks respectively, and resulting in an 11.6% increase in LLM-based planner accuracy. Additionally, we show that our proposed lightweight model using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) with LambdaMART outperforms GPT-4 based retrieval. Moreover, we observe context augmentation at plan generation, even after tool retrieval, reduces hallucination.
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.
Contextual word representations derived from pre-trained bidirectional language models (biLMs) have recently been shown to provide significant improvements to the state of the art for a wide range of NLP tasks. However, many questions remain as to how and why these models are so effective. In this paper, we present a detailed empirical study of how the choice of neural architecture (e.g. LSTM, CNN, or self attention) influences both end task accuracy and qualitative properties of the representations that are learned. We show there is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy, but all architectures learn high quality contextual representations that outperform word embeddings for four challenging NLP tasks. Additionally, all architectures learn representations that vary with network depth, from exclusively morphological based at the word embedding layer through local syntax based in the lower contextual layers to longer range semantics such coreference at the upper layers. Together, these results suggest that unsupervised biLMs, independent of architecture, are learning much more about the structure of language than previously appreciated.
Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However, this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25\% of the original training data.