Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in text comprehension and logical reasoning, indicating that the text representations learned by LLMs can facilitate their language processing capabilities. In cognitive science, brain cognitive processing signals are typically utilized to study human language processing. Therefore, it is natural to ask how well the text embeddings from LLMs align with the brain cognitive processing signals, and how training strategies affect the LLM-brain alignment? In this paper, we employ Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) to measure the alignment between 23 mainstream LLMs and fMRI signals of the brain to evaluate how effectively LLMs simulate cognitive language processing. We empirically investigate the impact of various factors (e.g., pre-training data size, model scaling, alignment training, and prompts) on such LLM-brain alignment. Experimental results indicate that pre-training data size and model scaling are positively correlated with LLM-brain similarity, and alignment training can significantly improve LLM-brain similarity. Explicit prompts contribute to the consistency of LLMs with brain cognitive language processing, while nonsensical noisy prompts may attenuate such alignment. Additionally, the performance of a wide range of LLM evaluations (e.g., MMLU, Chatbot Arena) is highly correlated with the LLM-brain similarity.
While preliminary findings indicate that multilingual LLMs exhibit reduced bias compared to monolingual ones, a comprehensive understanding of the effect of multilingual training on bias mitigation, is lacking. This study addresses this gap by systematically training six LLMs of identical size (2.6B parameters) and architecture: five monolingual models (English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish) and one multilingual model trained on an equal distribution of data across these languages, all using publicly available data. To ensure robust evaluation, standard bias benchmarks were automatically translated into the five target languages and verified for both translation quality and bias preservation by human annotators. Our results consistently demonstrate that multilingual training effectively mitigates bias. Moreover, we observe that multilingual models achieve not only lower bias but also superior prediction accuracy when compared to monolingual models with the same amount of training data, model architecture, and size.
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a simple and effective method for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The basic idea of CoT is to let LLMs break down their thought processes step-by-step by putting exemplars in the input prompt. However, the densely structured prompt exemplars of CoT may cause the cognitive overload of LLMs. Inspired by human cognition, we introduce COT-SEP, a method that strategically employs separators at the end of each exemplar in CoT prompting. These separators are designed to help the LLMs understand their thought processes better while reasoning. Interestingly, it turns out that COT-SEP significantly improves the LLMs' performances on complex reasoning tasks (e.g., GSM8K, AQuA, CSQA), compared with the vanilla CoT, which does not use separators. We also study the effects of the type and the location of separators tested on multiple LLMs, including GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, and LLaMA-2 7B.
Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT, have significantly reshaped text generation, particularly in the realm of writing assistance. While ethical considerations underscore the importance of transparently acknowledging LLM use, especially in scientific communication, genuine acknowledgment remains infrequent. A potential avenue to encourage accurate acknowledging of LLM-assisted writing involves employing automated detectors. Our evaluation of four cutting-edge LLM-generated text detectors reveals their suboptimal performance compared to a simple ad-hoc detector designed to identify abrupt writing style changes around the time of LLM proliferation. We contend that the development of specialized detectors exclusively dedicated to LLM-assisted writing detection is necessary. Such detectors could play a crucial role in fostering more authentic recognition of LLM involvement in scientific communication, addressing the current challenges in acknowledgment practices.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully used in many problems involving graph-structured data, achieving state-of-the-art performance. GNNs typically employ a message-passing scheme, in which every node aggregates information from its neighbors using a permutation-invariant aggregation function. Standard well-examined choices such as the mean or sum aggregation functions have limited capabilities, as they are not able to capture interactions among neighbors. In this work, we formalize these interactions using an information-theoretic framework that notably includes synergistic information. Driven by this definition, we introduce the Graph Ordering Attention (GOAT) layer, a novel GNN component that captures interactions between nodes in a neighborhood. This is achieved by learning local node orderings via an attention mechanism and processing the ordered representations using a recurrent neural network aggregator. This design allows us to make use of a permutation-sensitive aggregator while maintaining the permutation-equivariance of the proposed GOAT layer. The GOAT model demonstrates its increased performance in modeling graph metrics that capture complex information, such as the betweenness centrality and the effective size of a node. In practical use-cases, its superior modeling capability is confirmed through its success in several real-world node classification benchmarks.
Feature attribution methods are popular in interpretable machine learning. These methods compute the attribution of each input feature to represent its importance, but there is no consensus on the definition of "attribution", leading to many competing methods with little systematic evaluation, complicated in particular by the lack of ground truth attribution. To address this, we propose a dataset modification procedure to induce such ground truth. Using this procedure, we evaluate three common methods: saliency maps, rationales, and attentions. We identify several deficiencies and add new perspectives to the growing body of evidence questioning the correctness and reliability of these methods applied on datasets in the wild. We further discuss possible avenues for remedy and recommend new attribution methods to be tested against ground truth before deployment. The code is available at \url{//github.com/YilunZhou/feature-attribution-evaluation}.
Recently, a considerable literature has grown up around the theme of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly propagating and updating the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the Knowledge Embedding based Graph Convolutional Network (KE-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge embedding (a.k.a. knowledge graph embedding) methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that KE-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of KE-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
Non-convex optimization is ubiquitous in modern machine learning. Researchers devise non-convex objective functions and optimize them using off-the-shelf optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which leverage the local geometry and update iteratively. Even though solving non-convex functions is NP-hard in the worst case, the optimization quality in practice is often not an issue -- optimizers are largely believed to find approximate global minima. Researchers hypothesize a unified explanation for this intriguing phenomenon: most of the local minima of the practically-used objectives are approximately global minima. We rigorously formalize it for concrete instances of machine learning problems.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently become the primary choice for learning from graph-structured data, superseding hash fingerprints in representing chemical compounds. However, GCNs lack the ability to take into account the ordering of node neighbors, even when there is a geometric interpretation of the graph vertices that provides an order based on their spatial positions. To remedy this issue, we propose Geometric Graph Convolutional Network (geo-GCN) which uses spatial features to efficiently learn from graphs that can be naturally located in space. Our contribution is threefold: we propose a GCN-inspired architecture which (i) leverages node positions, (ii) is a proper generalisation of both GCNs and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), (iii) benefits from augmentation which further improves the performance and assures invariance with respect to the desired properties. Empirically, geo-GCN outperforms state-of-the-art graph-based methods on image classification and chemical tasks.
In recent years, DBpedia, Freebase, OpenCyc, Wikidata, and YAGO have been published as noteworthy large, cross-domain, and freely available knowledge graphs. Although extensively in use, these knowledge graphs are hard to compare against each other in a given setting. Thus, it is a challenge for researchers and developers to pick the best knowledge graph for their individual needs. In our recent survey, we devised and applied data quality criteria to the above-mentioned knowledge graphs. Furthermore, we proposed a framework for finding the most suitable knowledge graph for a given setting. With this paper we intend to ease the access to our in-depth survey by presenting simplified rules that map individual data quality requirements to specific knowledge graphs. However, this paper does not intend to replace our previously introduced decision-support framework. For an informed decision on which KG is best for you we still refer to our in-depth survey.
Knowledge graphs (KGs), which could provide essential relational information between entities, have been widely utilized in various knowledge-driven applications. Since the overall human knowledge is innumerable that still grows explosively and changes frequently, knowledge construction and update inevitably involve automatic mechanisms with less human supervision, which usually bring in plenty of noises and conflicts to KGs. However, most conventional knowledge representation learning methods assume that all triple facts in existing KGs share the same significance without any noises. To address this problem, we propose a novel confidence-aware knowledge representation learning framework (CKRL), which detects possible noises in KGs while learning knowledge representations with confidence simultaneously. Specifically, we introduce the triple confidence to conventional translation-based methods for knowledge representation learning. To make triple confidence more flexible and universal, we only utilize the internal structural information in KGs, and propose three kinds of triple confidences considering both local and global structural information. In experiments, We evaluate our models on knowledge graph noise detection, knowledge graph completion and triple classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our confidence-aware models achieve significant and consistent improvements on all tasks, which confirms the capability of CKRL modeling confidence with structural information in both KG noise detection and knowledge representation learning.