Benefiting from the powerful capabilities of large language models (LLMs), agents based on LLMs have shown the potential to address domain-specific tasks and emulate human behaviors. However, the content generated by these agents remains somewhat superficial, owing to their limited domain expertise and the absence of an effective cognitive architecture. To address this, we present the Configurable General Multi-Agent Interaction (CGMI) framework, designed to replicate human interactions in real-world scenarios. Specifically, we propose a tree-structured methodology for the assignment, detection, and maintenance of agent personality. Additionally, we designed a cognitive architecture equipped with a skill library based on the ACT* model, which contains memory, reflection, and planning modules. We have also integrated general agents to augment the virtual environment's realism. Using the CGMI framework, we simulated numerous classroom interactions between teacher and students. The experiments indicate that aspects such as the teaching methodology, curriculum, and student performance closely mirror real classroom settings. We will open source our work.
Datasets of labeled network traces are essential for a multitude of machine learning (ML) tasks in networking, yet their availability is hindered by privacy and maintenance concerns, such as data staleness. To overcome this limitation, synthetic network traces can often augment existing datasets. Unfortunately, current synthetic trace generation methods, which typically produce only aggregated flow statistics or a few selected packet attributes, do not always suffice, especially when model training relies on having features that are only available from packet traces. This shortfall manifests in both insufficient statistical resemblance to real traces and suboptimal performance on ML tasks when employed for data augmentation. In this paper, we apply diffusion models to generate high-resolution synthetic network traffic traces. We present NetDiffusion, a tool that uses a finely-tuned, controlled variant of a Stable Diffusion model to generate synthetic network traffic that is high fidelity and conforms to protocol specifications. Our evaluation demonstrates that packet captures generated from NetDiffusion can achieve higher statistical similarity to real data and improved ML model performance than current state-of-the-art approaches (e.g., GAN-based approaches). Furthermore, our synthetic traces are compatible with common network analysis tools and support a myriad of network tasks, suggesting that NetDiffusion can serve a broader spectrum of network analysis and testing tasks, extending beyond ML-centric applications.
Recent studies report that autoregressive language models can successfully solve many NLP tasks via zero- and few-shot learning paradigms, which opens up new possibilities for using the pre-trained language models. This paper introduces two autoregressive GPT-like models with 1.3 billion and 13 billion parameters trained on 60 languages from 25 language families using Wikipedia and Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus. We reproduce the GPT-3 architecture using GPT-2 sources and the sparse attention mechanism; Deepspeed and Megatron frameworks allow us to parallelize the training and inference steps effectively. The resulting models show performance on par with the recently released XGLM models by Facebook, covering more languages and enhancing NLP possibilities for low resource languages of CIS countries and Russian small nations. We detail the motivation for the choices of the architecture design, thoroughly describe the data preparation pipeline, and train five small versions of the model to choose the most optimal multilingual tokenization strategy. We measure the model perplexity in all covered languages and evaluate it on the wide spectre of multilingual tasks, including classification, generative, sequence labeling and knowledge probing. The models were evaluated with the zero-shot and few-shot methods. Furthermore, we compared the classification tasks with the state-of-the-art multilingual model XGLM. source code and the mGPT XL model are publicly released.
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in NLP-related tasks such as translation, summarizing, and generation. The application of LLMs in specific areas, notably AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations), holds great potential due to their advanced abilities in information summarizing, report analyzing, and ability of API calling. Nevertheless, the performance of current LLMs in AIOps tasks is yet to be determined. Furthermore, a comprehensive benchmark is required to steer the optimization of LLMs tailored for AIOps. Compared with existing benchmarks that focus on evaluating specific fields like network configuration, in this paper, we present \textbf{OpsEval}, a comprehensive task-oriented AIOps benchmark designed for LLMs. For the first time, OpsEval assesses LLMs' proficiency in three crucial scenarios (Wired Network Operation, 5G Communication Operation, and Database Operation) at various ability levels (knowledge recall, analytical thinking, and practical application). The benchmark includes 7,200 questions in both multiple-choice and question-answer (QA) formats, available in English and Chinese. With quantitative and qualitative results, we show how various LLM tricks can affect the performance of AIOps, including zero-shot, chain-of-thought, and few-shot in-context learning. We find that GPT4-score is more consistent with experts than widely used Bleu and Rouge, which can be used to replace automatic metrics for large-scale qualitative evaluations.
Pretraining auto-regressive large language models (LLMs) with retrieval demonstrates better perplexity and factual accuracy by leveraging external databases. However, the size of existing pretrained retrieval-augmented LLM is still limited (e.g., Retro has 7.5B parameters), which limits the effectiveness of instruction tuning and zero-shot generalization. In this work, we introduce Retro 48B, the largest LLM pretrained with retrieval before instruction tuning. Specifically, we continue to pretrain the 43B GPT model on additional 100 billion tokens using the Retro augmentation method by retrieving from 1.2 trillion tokens. The obtained foundation model, Retro 48B, largely outperforms the original 43B GPT in terms of perplexity. After instruction tuning on Retro, InstructRetro demonstrates significant improvement over the instruction tuned GPT on zero-shot question answering (QA) tasks. Specifically, the average improvement of InstructRetro is 7% over its GPT counterpart across 8 short-form QA tasks, and 10% over GPT across 4 challenging long-form QA tasks. Surprisingly, we find that one can ablate the encoder from InstructRetro architecture and directly use its decoder backbone, while achieving comparable results. We hypothesize that pretraining with retrieval makes its decoder good at incorporating context for QA. Our results highlights the promising direction to obtain a better GPT decoder for QA through continued pretraining with retrieval before instruction tuning.
The success of language models has inspired the NLP community to attend to tasks that require implicit and complex reasoning, relying on human-like commonsense mechanisms. While such vertical thinking tasks have been relatively popular, lateral thinking puzzles have received little attention. To bridge this gap, we devise BRAINTEASER: a multiple-choice Question Answering task designed to test the model's ability to exhibit lateral thinking and defy default commonsense associations. We design a three-step procedure for creating the first lateral thinking benchmark, consisting of data collection, distractor generation, and generation of adversarial examples, leading to 1,100 puzzles with high-quality annotations. To assess the consistency of lateral reasoning by models, we enrich BRAINTEASER based on a semantic and contextual reconstruction of its questions. Our experiments with state-of-the-art instruction- and commonsense language models reveal a significant gap between human and model performance, which is further widened when consistency across adversarial formats is considered. We make all of our code and data available to stimulate work on developing and evaluating lateral thinking models.
Generated texts from large language models (LLMs) are remarkably close to high-quality human-authored text, raising concerns about their potential misuse in spreading false information and academic misconduct. Consequently, there is an urgent need for a highly practical detection tool capable of accurately identifying the source of a given text. However, existing detection tools typically rely on access to LLMs and can only differentiate between machine-generated and human-authored text, failing to meet the requirements of fine-grained tracing, intermediary judgment, and rapid detection. Therefore, we propose LLMDet, a model-specific, secure, efficient, and extendable detection tool, that can source text from specific LLMs, such as GPT-2, OPT, LLaMA, and others. In LLMDet, we record the next-token probabilities of salient n-grams as features to calculate proxy perplexity for each LLM. By jointly analyzing the proxy perplexities of LLMs, we can determine the source of the generated text. Experimental results show that LLMDet yields impressive detection performance while ensuring speed and security, achieving 98.54% precision and x3.5 faster for recognizing human-authored text. Additionally, LLMDet can effortlessly extend its detection capabilities to a new open-source model. We will provide an open-source tool at //github.com/TrustedLLM/LLMDet.
While enabling large language models to implement function calling (known as APIs) can greatly enhance the performance of LLMs, function calling is still a challenging task due to the complicated relations between different APIs, especially in a context-learning setting without fine-tuning. This paper proposes a simple yet controllable target-driven approach called Reverse Chain to empower LLMs with capabilities to use external APIs with only prompts. Given that most open-source LLMs have limited tool-use or tool-plan capabilities, LLMs in Reverse Chain are only employed to implement simple tasks, e.g., API selection and argument completion, and a generic rule is employed to implement a controllable multiple functions calling. In this generic rule, after selecting a final API to handle a given task via LLMs, we first ask LLMs to fill the required arguments from user query and context. Some missing arguments could be further completed by letting LLMs select another API based on API description before asking user. This process continues until a given task is completed. Extensive numerical experiments indicate an impressive capability of Reverse Chain on implementing multiple function calling. Interestingly enough, the experiments also reveal that tool-use capabilities of the existing LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT, can be greatly improved via Reverse Chain.
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.
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.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have gained significant traction in the field of machine learning, particularly due to their high accuracy in visual recognition. Recent works have pushed the performance of GPU implementations of CNNs to significantly improve their classification and training times. With these improvements, many frameworks have become available for implementing CNNs on both CPUs and GPUs, with no support for FPGA implementations. In this work we present a modified version of the popular CNN framework Caffe, with FPGA support. This allows for classification using CNN models and specialized FPGA implementations with the flexibility of reprogramming the device when necessary, seamless memory transactions between host and device, simple-to-use test benches, and the ability to create pipelined layer implementations. To validate the framework, we use the Xilinx SDAccel environment to implement an FPGA-based Winograd convolution engine and show that the FPGA layer can be used alongside other layers running on a host processor to run several popular CNNs (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG A, Overfeat). The results show that our framework achieves 50 GFLOPS across 3x3 convolutions in the benchmarks. This is achieved within a practical framework, which will aid in future development of FPGA-based CNNs.