The advent of large language models (LLMs) like GitHub Copilot has significantly enhanced programmers' productivity, particularly in code generation. However, these models often struggle with real-world tasks without fine-tuning. As LLMs grow larger and more performant, fine-tuning for specialized tasks becomes increasingly expensive. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, which fine-tune only a subset of model parameters, offer a promising solution by reducing the computational costs of tuning LLMs while maintaining their performance. Existing studies have explored using PEFT and LLMs for various code-related tasks and found that the effectiveness of PEFT techniques is task-dependent. The application of PEFT techniques in unit test generation remains underexplored. The state-of-the-art is limited to using LLMs with full fine-tuning to generate unit tests. This paper investigates both full fine-tuning and various PEFT methods, including LoRA, (IA)^3, and prompt tuning, across different model architectures and sizes. We use well-established benchmark datasets to evaluate their effectiveness in unit test generation. Our findings show that PEFT methods can deliver performance comparable to full fine-tuning for unit test generation, making specialized fine-tuning more accessible and cost-effective. Notably, prompt tuning is the most effective in terms of cost and resource utilization, while LoRA approaches the effectiveness of full fine-tuning in several cases.
The increasing prevalence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced text generation, but the human-like quality of LLM outputs presents major challenges in reliably distinguishing between human-authored and LLM-generated texts. Existing detection benchmarks are constrained by their reliance on static datasets, scenario-specific tasks (e.g., question answering and text refinement), and a primary focus on English, overlooking the diverse linguistic and operational subtleties of LLMs. To address these gaps, we propose CUDRT, a comprehensive evaluation framework and bilingual benchmark in Chinese and English, categorizing LLM activities into five key operations: Create, Update, Delete, Rewrite, and Translate. CUDRT provides extensive datasets tailored to each operation, featuring outputs from state-of-the-art LLMs to assess the reliability of LLM-generated text detectors. This framework supports scalable, reproducible experiments and enables in-depth analysis of how operational diversity, multilingual training sets, and LLM architectures influence detection performance. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the framework's capacity to optimize detection systems, providing critical insights to enhance reliability, cross-linguistic adaptability, and detection accuracy. By advancing robust methodologies for identifying LLM-generated texts, this work contributes to the development of intelligent systems capable of meeting real-world multilingual detection challenges. Source code and dataset are available at GitHub.
DNN-based language models perform excellently on various tasks, but even SOTA LLMs are susceptible to textual adversarial attacks. Adversarial texts play crucial roles in multiple subfields of NLP. However, current research has the following issues. (1) Most textual adversarial attack methods target rich-resourced languages. How do we generate adversarial texts for less-studied languages? (2) Most textual adversarial attack methods are prone to generating invalid or ambiguous adversarial texts. How do we construct high-quality adversarial robustness benchmarks? (3) New language models may be immune to part of previously generated adversarial texts. How do we update adversarial robustness benchmarks? To address the above issues, we introduce HITL-GAT, a system based on a general approach to human-in-the-loop generation of adversarial texts. HITL-GAT contains four stages in one pipeline: victim model construction, adversarial example generation, high-quality benchmark construction, and adversarial robustness evaluation. Additionally, we utilize HITL-GAT to make a case study on Tibetan script which can be a reference for the adversarial research of other less-studied languages.
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the resource demands of these models pose substantial challenges. Structured pruning is an effective approach to reducing model size, but it often results in significant accuracy degradation, necessitating parameter updates to adapt. Unfortunately, such fine-tuning requires substantial memory, which limits its applicability. To address these challenges, we introduce quantization into the structured pruning framework to reduce memory consumption during both fine-tuning and inference. However, the combined errors from pruning and quantization increase the difficulty of fine-tuning, requiring a more refined quantization scheme. To this end, we propose QPruner, a novel framework that employs structured pruning to reduce model size, followed by a layer-wise mixed-precision quantization scheme. Quantization precisions are assigned to each layer based on their importance to the target task, and Bayesian optimization is employed to refine precision allocation strategies, ensuring a balance between model accuracy and memory efficiency. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that QPruner significantly outperforms existing methods in memory savings while maintaining or improving model performance.
With rapid advances, generative large language models (LLMs) dominate various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks from understanding to reasoning. Yet, language models' inherent vulnerabilities may be exacerbated due to increased accessibility and unrestricted model training on massive data. A malicious adversary may publish poisoned data online and conduct backdoor attacks on the victim LLMs pre-trained on the poisoned data. Backdoored LLMs behave innocuously for normal queries and generate harmful responses when the backdoor trigger is activated. Despite significant efforts paid to LLMs' safety issues, LLMs are still struggling against backdoor attacks. As Anthropic recently revealed, existing safety training strategies, including supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), fail to revoke the backdoors once the LLM is backdoored during the pre-training stage. In this paper, we present Simulate and Eliminate (SANDE) to erase the undesired backdoored mappings for generative LLMs. We initially propose Overwrite Supervised Fine-tuning (OSFT) for effective backdoor removal when the trigger is known. Then, to handle scenarios where trigger patterns are unknown, we integrate OSFT into our two-stage framework, SANDE. Unlike other works that assume access to cleanly trained models, our safety-enhanced LLMs are able to revoke backdoors without any reference. Consequently, our safety-enhanced LLMs no longer produce targeted responses when the backdoor triggers are activated. We conduct comprehensive experiments to show that our proposed SANDE is effective against backdoor attacks while bringing minimal harm to LLMs' powerful capability.
Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate confident yet inaccurate responses, introducing significant risks for deployment in safety-critical domains. We present a novel approach to detecting model hallucination through systematic analysis of information flow across model layers when processing inputs with insufficient or ambiguous context. Our investigation reveals that hallucination manifests as usable information deficiencies in inter-layer transmissions. While existing approaches primarily focus on final-layer output analysis, we demonstrate that tracking cross-layer information dynamics ($\mathcal{L}$I) provides robust indicators of model reliability, accounting for both information gain and loss during computation. $\mathcal{L}$I improves model reliability by immediately integrating with universal LLMs without additional training or architectural modifications.
Quantization of Deep Neural Network (DNN) activations is a commonly used technique to reduce compute and memory demands during DNN inference, which can be particularly beneficial on resource-constrained devices. To achieve high accuracy, existing methods for quantizing activations rely on complex mathematical computations or perform extensive searches for the best hyper-parameters. However, these expensive operations are impractical on devices with limited computation capabilities, memory capacities, and energy budgets. Furthermore, many existing methods do not focus on sub-6-bit (or deep) quantization. To fill these gaps, in this paper we propose DQA (Deep Quantization of DNN Activations), a new method that focuses on sub-6-bit quantization of activations and leverages simple shifting-based operations and Huffman coding to be efficient and achieve high accuracy. We evaluate DQA with 3, 4, and 5-bit quantization levels and three different DNN models for two different tasks, image classification and image segmentation, on two different datasets. DQA shows significantly better accuracy (up to 29.28%) compared to the direct quantization method and the state-of-the-art NoisyQuant for sub-6-bit quantization.
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized many fields, not only traditional natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Recently, research on applying LLMs to the database field has been booming, and as a typical non-relational database, the use of LLMs in graph database research has naturally gained significant attention. Recent efforts have increasingly focused on leveraging LLMs to translate natural language into graph query language (NL2GQL). Although some progress has been made, these methods have clear limitations, such as their reliance on streamlined processes that often overlook the potential of LLMs to autonomously plan and collaborate with other LLMs in tackling complex NL2GQL challenges. To address this gap, we propose NAT-NL2GQL, a novel multi-agent framework for translating natural language to graph query language. Specifically, our framework consists of three synergistic agents: the Preprocessor agent, the Generator agent, and the Refiner agent. The Preprocessor agent manages data processing as context, including tasks such as name entity recognition, query rewriting, path linking, and the extraction of query-related schemas. The Generator agent is a fine-tuned LLM trained on NL-GQL data, responsible for generating corresponding GQL statements based on queries and their related schemas. The Refiner agent is tasked with refining the GQL or context using error information obtained from the GQL execution results. Given the scarcity of high-quality open-source NL2GQL datasets based on nGQL syntax, we developed StockGQL, a dataset constructed from a financial market graph database. It is available at: //github.com/leonyuancode/StockGQL. Experimental results on the StockGQL and SpCQL datasets reveal that our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches, highlighting its potential for advancing NL2GQL research.
The recent success of large language models (LLMs) trained on static, pre-collected, general datasets has sparked numerous research directions and applications. One such direction addresses the non-trivial challenge of integrating pre-trained LLMs into dynamic data distributions, task structures, and user preferences. Pre-trained LLMs, when tailored for specific needs, often experience significant performance degradation in previous knowledge domains -- a phenomenon known as "catastrophic forgetting". While extensively studied in the continual learning (CL) community, it presents new manifestations in the realm of LLMs. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the current research progress on LLMs within the context of CL. This survey is structured into four main sections: we first describe an overview of continually learning LLMs, consisting of two directions of continuity: vertical continuity (or vertical continual learning), i.e., continual adaptation from general to specific capabilities, and horizontal continuity (or horizontal continual learning), i.e., continual adaptation across time and domains (Section 3). We then summarize three stages of learning LLMs in the context of modern CL: Continual Pre-Training (CPT), Domain-Adaptive Pre-training (DAP), and Continual Fine-Tuning (CFT) (Section 4). Then we provide an overview of evaluation protocols for continual learning with LLMs, along with the current available data sources (Section 5). Finally, we discuss intriguing questions pertaining to continual learning for LLMs (Section 6). The full list of papers examined in this survey is available at //github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/llm-continual-learning-survey.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where "prompt'' plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: 1) temporal lag of training data, and 2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power of LLMs for downstream tasks, but a lack of systematic literature and standardized terminology, partly due to the rapid evolution of this field. Therefore, in this work, we survey related prompting tools and promote the concept of the "Prompting Framework" (PF), i.e. the framework for managing, simplifying, and facilitating interaction with large language models. We define the lifecycle of the PF as a hierarchical structure, from bottom to top, namely: Data Level, Base Level, Execute Level, and Service Level. We also systematically depict the overall landscape of the emerging PF field and discuss potential future research and challenges. To continuously track the developments in this area, we maintain a repository at //github.com/lxx0628/Prompting-Framework-Survey, which can be a useful resource sharing platform for both academic and industry in this field.
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.