Large language models (LLMs) have been touted to enable increased productivity in many areas of today's work life. Scientific research as an area of work is no exception: the potential of LLM-based tools to assist in the daily work of scientists has become a highly discussed topic across disciplines. However, we are only at the very onset of this subject of study. It is still unclear how the potential of LLMs will materialise in research practice. With this study, we give first empirical evidence on the use of LLMs in the research process. We have investigated a set of use cases for LLM-based tools in scientific research, and conducted a first study to assess to which degree current tools are helpful. In this paper we report specifically on use cases related to software engineering, such as generating application code and developing scripts for data analytics. While we studied seemingly simple use cases, results across tools differ significantly. Our results highlight the promise of LLM-based tools in general, yet we also observe various issues, particularly regarding the integrity of the output these tools provide.
Using large language models (LLMs) to assist psychological counseling is a significant but challenging task at present. Attempts have been made on improving empathetic conversations or acting as effective assistants in the treatment with LLMs. However, the existing datasets lack consulting knowledge, resulting in LLMs lacking professional consulting competence. Moreover, how to automatically evaluate multi-turn dialogues within the counseling process remains an understudied area. To bridge the gap, we propose CPsyCoun, a report-based multi-turn dialogue reconstruction and evaluation framework for Chinese psychological counseling. To fully exploit psychological counseling reports, a two-phase approach is devised to construct high-quality dialogues while a comprehensive evaluation benchmark is developed for the effective automatic evaluation of multi-turn psychological consultations. Competitive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in psychological counseling. We open-source the datasets and model for future research at //github.com/CAS-SIAT-XinHai/CPsyCoun
Large language models (LLMs) have shown amazing capabilities in knowledge memorization and present. However, when it comes to domain-specific knowledge and downstream tasks like medical, general LLMs are often unable to give precise answers. In addition, when people want LLMs to answer classification questions, they usually go through instruction tuning first, however, LLMs do not always give a direct index of the categorization after instruction tuning. In this paper, we proposed LlamaCare, a fine-tuned medical language model, and Extended Classification Integration(ECI), a module to handle classification problems of LLMs. Our contributions are : (i) We fine-tuned a large language model of medical knowledge with very low carbon emissions and achieved similar performance with ChatGPT by a 24G GPU. (ii) We solved the problem of redundant categorical answers and improved the performance of LLMs by proposing a new module called Extended Classification Integration. (iii) We released our processed data for one-shot and few-shot training for some benchmarks such as PubMedQA and USMLE 1-3 step. Our method achieves a close effect with the state-of-the-art model in benchmarks while costing lower GPU resources compared to LLMs with the same quantity of parameters. Our models, codes, and datasets can be found in //github.com/Stephen-SMJ/LLamaCare
Pretrained language models (PLMs) have become remarkably adept at task and language generalization. Nonetheless, they often fail when faced with unseen languages. In this work, we present LinguAlchemy, a regularization method that incorporates various linguistic information covering typological, geographical, and phylogenetic features to align PLMs representation to the corresponding linguistic information on each language. Our LinguAlchemy significantly improves the performance of mBERT and XLM-R on low-resource languages in multiple downstream tasks such as intent classification, news classification, and semantic relatedness compared to fully finetuned models and displaying a high degree of unseen language generalization. We further introduce AlchemyScale and AlchemyTune, extension of LinguAlchemy which adjusts the linguistic regularization weights automatically, alleviating the need for hyperparameter search.
Large language models with instruction-following abilities have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. These models show exceptional generalizability to tackle various real-world tasks through their natural language interfaces. However, their performance heavily relies on high-quality exemplar data, which is often difficult to obtain. This challenge is further exacerbated when it comes to multimodal instruction following. We introduce TextBind, an almost annotation-free framework for empowering larger language models with the multi-turn interleaved multimodal instruction-following capabilities. Our approach requires only image-caption pairs and generates multi-turn multimodal instruction-response conversations from a language model. To accommodate interleaved image-text inputs and outputs, we devise MIM, a language model-centric architecture that seamlessly integrates image encoder and decoder models. We release our dataset, model, and demo to foster future research in the area of multimodal instruction following.
The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has propelled the development of dialogue systems. Unlike the popular ChatGPT-like assistant model, which only satisfies the user's preferences, task-oriented dialogue systems have also faced new requirements and challenges in the broader business field. They are expected to provide correct responses at each dialogue turn, at the same time, achieve the overall goal defined by the task. By understanding rhetorical structures and topic structures via topic segmentation and discourse parsing, a dialogue system may do a better planning to achieve both objectives. However, while both structures belong to discourse structure in linguistics, rhetorical structure and topic structure are mostly modeled separately or with one assisting the other in the prior work. The interaction between these two structures has not been considered for joint modeling and mutual learning. Furthermore, unsupervised learning techniques to achieve the above are not well explored. To fill this gap, we propose an unsupervised mutual learning framework of two structures leveraging the global and local connections between them. We extend the topic modeling between non-adjacent discourse units to ensure global structural relevance with rhetorical structures. We also incorporate rhetorical structures into the topic structure through a graph neural network model to ensure local coherence consistency. Finally, we utilize the similarity between the two fused structures for mutual learning. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods outperform all strong baselines on two dialogue rhetorical datasets (STAC and Molweni), as well as dialogue topic datasets (Doc2Dial and TIAGE). We provide our code at //github.com/Jeff-Sue/URT.
Large language models (LLMs) often hallucinate and lack the ability to provide attribution for their generations. Semi-parametric LMs, such as kNN-LM, approach these limitations by refining the output of an LM for a given prompt using its nearest neighbor matches in a non-parametric data store. However, these models often exhibit slow inference speeds and produce non-fluent texts. In this paper, we introduce Nearest Neighbor Speculative Decoding (NEST), a novel semi-parametric language modeling approach that is capable of incorporating real-world text spans of arbitrary length into the LM generations and providing attribution to their sources. NEST performs token-level retrieval at each inference step to compute a semi-parametric mixture distribution and identify promising span continuations in a corpus. It then uses an approximate speculative decoding procedure that accepts a prefix of the retrieved span or generates a new token. NEST significantly enhances the generation quality and attribution rate of the base LM across a variety of knowledge-intensive tasks, surpassing the conventional kNN-LM method and performing competitively with in-context retrieval augmentation. In addition, NEST substantially improves the generation speed, achieving a 1.8x speedup in inference time when applied to Llama-2-Chat 70B.
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.
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been the de facto paradigm for most natural language processing (NLP) tasks. This also benefits biomedical domain: researchers from informatics, medicine, and computer science (CS) communities propose various PLMs trained on biomedical datasets, e.g., biomedical text, electronic health records, protein, and DNA sequences for various biomedical tasks. However, the cross-discipline characteristics of biomedical PLMs hinder their spreading among communities; some existing works are isolated from each other without comprehensive comparison and discussions. It expects a survey that not only systematically reviews recent advances of biomedical PLMs and their applications but also standardizes terminology and benchmarks. In this paper, we summarize the recent progress of pre-trained language models in the biomedical domain and their applications in biomedical downstream tasks. Particularly, we discuss the motivations and propose a taxonomy of existing biomedical PLMs. Their applications in biomedical downstream tasks are exhaustively discussed. At last, we illustrate various limitations and future trends, which we hope can provide inspiration for the future research of the research community.
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 tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.