Compositional generalization is an important ability of language models and has many different manifestations. For data-to-text generation, previous research on this ability is limited to a single manifestation called Systematicity and lacks consideration of large language models (LLMs), which cannot fully cover practical application scenarios. In this work, we propose SPOR, a comprehensive and practical evaluation method for compositional generalization in data-to-text generation. SPOR includes four aspects of manifestations (Systematicity, Productivity, Order invariance, and Rule learnability) and allows high-quality evaluation without additional manual annotations based on existing datasets. We demonstrate SPOR on two different datasets and evaluate some existing language models including LLMs. We find that the models are deficient in various aspects of the evaluation and need further improvement. Our work shows the necessity for comprehensive research on different manifestations of compositional generalization in data-to-text generation and provides a framework for evaluation.
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet the choice of which model to use often involves a trade-off between performance and cost. More powerful models, though effective, come with higher expenses, while less capable models are more cost-effective. To address this dilemma, we propose several efficient router models that dynamically select between a stronger and a weaker LLM during inference, aiming to optimize the balance between cost and response quality. We develop a training framework for these routers leveraging human preference data and data augmentation techniques to enhance performance. Our evaluation on widely-recognized benchmarks shows that our approach significantly reduces costs-by over 2 times in certain cases-without compromising the quality of responses. Interestingly, our router models also demonstrate significant transfer learning capabilities, maintaining their performance even when the strong and weak models are changed at test time. This highlights the potential of these routers to provide a cost-effective yet high-performance solution for deploying LLMs.
Automatic factuality verification of large language model (LLM) generations is becoming more and more widely used to combat hallucinations. A major point of tension in the literature is the granularity of this fact-checking: larger chunks of text are hard to fact-check, but more atomic facts like propositions may lack context to interpret correctly. In this work, we assess the role of context in these atomic facts. We argue that fully atomic facts are not the right representation, and define two criteria for molecular facts: decontextuality, or how well they can stand alone, and minimality, or how little extra information is added to achieve decontexuality. We quantify the impact of decontextualization on minimality, then present a baseline methodology for generating molecular facts automatically, aiming to add the right amount of information. We compare against various methods of decontextualization and find that molecular facts balance minimality with fact verification accuracy in ambiguous settings.
Synthetic data generation has gained significant attention recently for its utility in training large vision and language models. However, the application of synthetic data to the training of multimodal context-augmented generation systems has been relatively unexplored. This gap in existing work is important because existing vision and language models (VLMs) are not trained specifically for context-augmented generation. Resources for adapting such models are therefore crucial for enabling their use in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) settings, where a retriever is used to gather relevant information that is then subsequently provided to a generative model via context augmentation. To address this challenging problem, we generate SK-VQA: a large synthetic multimodal dataset containing over 2 million question-answer pairs which require external knowledge to determine the final answer. Our dataset is both larger and significantly more diverse than existing resources of its kind, possessing over 11x more unique questions and containing images from a greater variety of sources than previously-proposed datasets. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our synthetic dataset can not only serve as a challenging benchmark, but is also highly effective for adapting existing generative multimodal models for context-augmented generation.
Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for transforming natural language questions into SQL queries (text-to-SQL) is a promising yet challenging approach, particularly when applied to real-world databases with complex and extensive schemas. In particular, effectively incorporating data catalogs and database values for SQL generation remains an obstacle, leading to suboptimal solutions. We address this problem by proposing a new pipeline that effectively retrieves relevant data and context, selects an efficient schema, and synthesizes correct and efficient SQL queries. To increase retrieval precision, our pipeline introduces a hierarchical retrieval method leveraging model-generated keywords, locality-sensitive hashing indexing, and vector databases. Additionally, we have developed an adaptive schema pruning technique that adjusts based on the complexity of the problem and the model's context size. Our approach generalizes to both frontier proprietary models like GPT-4 and open-source models such as Llama-3-70B. Through a series of ablation studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of each component of our pipeline and its impact on the end-to-end performance. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the cross-domain challenging BIRD dataset.
Mining information from graph databases is becoming overly important. To approach this problem, current methods focus on identifying subgraphs with specific topologies; as of today, no work has been focused on expressing jointly the syntax and semantics of mining operations over rich property graphs. We define MINE GRAPH RULE, a new operator for mining association rules from graph databases, by extending classical approaches used in relational databases and exploited by recommending systems. We describe the syntax and semantics of the operator, which is based on measuring the support and confidence of each rule, and then we provide several examples of increasing complexity on top of a realistic example; our operator embeds Cypher for expressing the mining conditions. MINE GRAPH RULE is implemented on top of Neo4j, the most successful graph database system; it takes advantage of built-in optimizations of the Neo4j engine, as well as optimizations that are defined in the context of relational association rules. Our implementation is available as a portable Neo4j plugin. At the end of our paper, we show the execution performance in a variety of settings, by varying the operators, the size of the graph, the ratio between node types, the method for creating relationships, and maximum support and confidence.
Large language models have been flourishing in the natural language processing (NLP) domain, and their potential for recommendation has been paid much attention to. Despite the intelligence shown by the recommendation-oriented finetuned models, LLMs struggle to fully understand the user behavior patterns due to their innate weakness in interpreting numerical features and the overhead for long context, where the temporal relations among user behaviors, subtle quantitative signals among different ratings, and various side features of items are not well explored. Existing works only fine-tune a sole LLM on given text data without introducing that important information to it, leaving these problems unsolved. In this paper, we propose ELCoRec to Enhance Language understanding with CoPropagation of numerical and categorical features for Recommendation. Concretely, we propose to inject the preference understanding capability into LLM via a GAT expert model where the user preference is better encoded by parallelly propagating the temporal relations, and rating signals as well as various side information of historical items. The parallel propagation mechanism could stabilize heterogeneous features and offer an informative user preference encoding, which is then injected into the language models via soft prompting at the cost of a single token embedding. To further obtain the user's recent interests, we proposed a novel Recent interaction Augmented Prompt (RAP) template. Experiment results over three datasets against strong baselines validate the effectiveness of ELCoRec. The code is available at //anonymous.4open.science/r/CIKM_Code_Repo-E6F5/README.md.
With the continuous growth in the number of parameters of transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs), particularly the emergence of large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters, many natural language processing (NLP) tasks have demonstrated remarkable success. However, the enormous size and computational demands of these models pose significant challenges for adapting them to specific downstream tasks, especially in environments with limited computational resources. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers an effective solution by reducing the number of fine-tuning parameters and memory usage while achieving comparable performance to full fine-tuning. The demands for fine-tuning PLMs, especially LLMs, have led to a surge in the development of PEFT methods, as depicted in Fig. 1. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and systematic review of PEFT methods for PLMs. We summarize these PEFT methods, discuss their applications, and outline future directions. Furthermore, we conduct experiments using several representative PEFT methods to better understand their effectiveness in parameter efficiency and memory efficiency. By offering insights into the latest advancements and practical applications, this survey serves as an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by PEFT in the context of PLMs.
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of downstream tasks, a significant concern revolves around their propensity to exhibit hallucinations: LLMs occasionally generate content that diverges from the user input, contradicts previously generated context, or misaligns with established world knowledge. This phenomenon poses a substantial challenge to the reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we survey recent efforts on the detection, explanation, and mitigation of hallucination, with an emphasis on the unique challenges posed by LLMs. We present taxonomies of the LLM hallucination phenomena and evaluation benchmarks, analyze existing approaches aiming at mitigating LLM hallucination, and discuss potential directions for future research.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
Visual dialogue is a challenging task that needs to extract implicit information from both visual (image) and textual (dialogue history) contexts. Classical approaches pay more attention to the integration of the current question, vision knowledge and text knowledge, despising the heterogeneous semantic gaps between the cross-modal information. In the meantime, the concatenation operation has become de-facto standard to the cross-modal information fusion, which has a limited ability in information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge-Bridge Graph Network (KBGN) model by using graph to bridge the cross-modal semantic relations between vision and text knowledge in fine granularity, as well as retrieving required knowledge via an adaptive information selection mode. Moreover, the reasoning clues for visual dialogue can be clearly drawn from intra-modal entities and inter-modal bridges. Experimental results on VisDial v1.0 and VisDial-Q datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms exiting models with state-of-the-art results.