Education
Is ChatGPT a General-Purpose Natural Language Processing Task Solver?
Qin, Chengwei, Zhang, Aston, Zhang, Zhuosheng, Chen, Jiaao, Yasunaga, Michihiro, Yang, Diyi
Spurred by advancements in scale, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to perform a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks zero-shot -- i.e., without adaptation on downstream data. Recently, the debut of ChatGPT has drawn a great deal of attention from the natural language processing (NLP) community due to the fact that it can generate high-quality responses to human input and self-correct previous mistakes based on subsequent conversations. However, it is not yet known whether ChatGPT can serve as a generalist model that can perform many NLP tasks zero-shot. In this work, we empirically analyze the zero-shot learning ability of ChatGPT by evaluating it on 20 popular NLP datasets covering 7 representative task categories. With extensive empirical studies, we demonstrate both the effectiveness and limitations of the current version of ChatGPT. We find that ChatGPT performs well on many tasks favoring reasoning capabilities (e.g., arithmetic reasoning) while it still faces challenges when solving specific tasks such as sequence tagging. We additionally provide in-depth analysis through qualitative case studies.
Dynamic Memory-based Curiosity: A Bootstrap Approach for Exploration
Gao, Zijian, Li, YiYing, Xu, Kele, Zhai, Yuanzhao, Feng, Dawei, Ding, Bo, Mao, XinJun, Wang, Huaimin
The sparsity of extrinsic rewards poses a serious challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). Currently, many efforts have been made on curiosity which can provide a representative intrinsic reward for effective exploration. However, the challenge is still far from being solved. In this paper, we present a novel curiosity for RL, named DyMeCu, which stands for Dynamic Memory-based Curiosity. Inspired by human curiosity and information theory, DyMeCu consists of a dynamic memory and dual online learners. The curiosity arouses if memorized information can not deal with the current state, and the information gap between dual learners can be formulated as the intrinsic reward for agents, and then such state information can be consolidated into the dynamic memory. Compared with previous curiosity methods, DyMeCu can better mimic human curiosity with dynamic memory, and the memory module can be dynamically grown based on a bootstrap paradigm with dual learners. On multiple benchmarks including DeepMind Control Suite and Atari Suite, large-scale empirical experiments are conducted and the results demonstrate that DyMeCu outperforms competitive curiosity-based methods with or without extrinsic rewards. We will release the code to enhance reproducibility.
Online Learning with Set-Valued Feedback
Raman, Vinod, Subedi, Unique, Tewari, Ambuj
We study a variant of online multiclass classification where the learner predicts a single label but receives a \textit{set of labels} as feedback. In this model, the learner is penalized for not outputting a label contained in the revealed set. We show that unlike online multiclass learning with single-label feedback, deterministic and randomized online learnability are \textit{not equivalent} in the realizable setting under set-valued feedback. In addition, we show that deterministic and randomized realizable learnability are equivalent if the Helly number of the collection of sets that can be revealed as feedback is finite. In light of this separation, we give two new combinatorial dimensions, named the Set Littlestone and Measure Shattering dimension, whose finiteness characterizes deterministic and randomized realizable learnability respectively. Additionally, these dimensions lower- and upper bound the deterministic and randomized minimax regret in the realizable setting. Going beyond the realizable setting, we prove that the Measure shattering dimension continues to characterize learnability and quantify minimax regret in the agnostic setting. Finally, we use our results to establish bounds on the minimax regret for three practical learning settings: online multilabel ranking, online multilabel classification, and real-valued prediction with interval-valued response.
Visual AI and Linguistic Intelligence Through Steerability and Composability
Noever, David, Noever, Samantha Elizabeth Miller
This study explores the capabilities of multimodal large language models (LLMs) in handling challenging multistep tasks that integrate language and vision, focusing on model steerability, composability, and the application of long-term memory and context understanding. The problem addressed is the LLM's ability (Nov 2023 GPT-4 Vision Preview) to manage tasks that require synthesizing visual and textual information, especially where stepwise instructions and sequential logic are paramount. The research presents a series of 14 creatively and constructively diverse tasks, ranging from AI Lego Designing to AI Satellite Image Analysis, designed to test the limits of current LLMs in contexts that previously proved difficult without extensive memory and contextual understanding. Key findings from evaluating 800 guided dialogs include notable disparities in task completion difficulty. For instance, 'Image to Ingredient AI Bartender' (Low difficulty) contrasted sharply with 'AI Game Self-Player' (High difficulty), highlighting the LLM's varying proficiency in processing complex visual data and generating coherent instructions. Tasks such as 'AI Genetic Programmer' and 'AI Negotiator' showed high completion difficulty, emphasizing challenges in maintaining context over multiple steps. The results underscore the importance of developing LLMs that combine long-term memory and contextual awareness to mimic human-like thought processes in complex problem-solving scenarios.
Environment-Aware Dynamic Graph Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Yuan, Haonan, Sun, Qingyun, Fu, Xingcheng, Zhang, Ziwei, Ji, Cheng, Peng, Hao, Li, Jianxin
Dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs) are increasingly pervasive in exploiting spatio-temporal patterns on dynamic graphs. However, existing works fail to generalize under distribution shifts, which are common in real-world scenarios. As the generation of dynamic graphs is heavily influenced by latent environments, investigating their impacts on the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is critical. However, it remains unexplored with the following two major challenges: (1) How to properly model and infer the complex environments on dynamic graphs with distribution shifts? (2) How to discover invariant patterns given inferred spatio-temporal environments? To solve these challenges, we propose a novel Environment-Aware dynamic Graph LEarning (EAGLE) framework for OOD generalization by modeling complex coupled environments and exploiting spatio-temporal invariant patterns. Specifically, we first design the environment-aware EA-DGNN to model environments by multi-channel environments disentangling. Then, we propose an environment instantiation mechanism for environment diversification with inferred distributions. Finally, we discriminate spatio-temporal invariant patterns for out-of-distribution prediction by the invariant pattern recognition mechanism and perform fine-grained causal interventions node-wisely with a mixture of instantiated environment samples. Experiments on real-world and synthetic dynamic graph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method against state-of-the-art baselines under distribution shifts. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study OOD generalization on dynamic graphs from the environment learning perspective.
Assessing AI Impact Assessments: A Classroom Study
Artificial Intelligence Impact Assessments ("AIIAs"), a family of tools that provide structured processes to imagine the possible impacts of a proposed AI system, have become an increasingly popular proposal to govern AI systems. Recent efforts from government or private-sector organizations have proposed many diverse instantiations of AIIAs, which take a variety of forms ranging from open-ended questionnaires to graded score-cards. However, to date that has been limited evaluation of existing AIIA instruments. We conduct a classroom study (N = 38) at a large research-intensive university (R1) in an elective course focused on the societal and ethical implications of AI. We assign students to different organizational roles (for example, an ML scientist or product manager) and ask participant teams to complete one of three existing AI impact assessments for one of two imagined generative AI systems. In our thematic analysis of participants' responses to pre- and post-activity questionnaires, we find preliminary evidence that impact assessments can influence participants' perceptions of the potential risks of generative AI systems, and the level of responsibility held by AI experts in addressing potential harm. We also discover a consistent set of limitations shared by several existing AIIA instruments, which we group into concerns about their format and content, as well as the feasibility and effectiveness of the activity in foreseeing and mitigating potential harms. Drawing on the findings of this study, we provide recommendations for future work on developing and validating AIIAs.
Adapters: A Unified Library for Parameter-Efficient and Modular Transfer Learning
Poth, Clifton, Sterz, Hannah, Paul, Indraneil, Purkayastha, Sukannya, Engländer, Leon, Imhof, Timo, Vulić, Ivan, Ruder, Sebastian, Gurevych, Iryna, Pfeiffer, Jonas
We introduce Adapters, an open-source library that unifies parameter-efficient and modular transfer learning in large language models. By integrating 10 diverse adapter methods into a unified interface, Adapters offers ease of use and flexible configuration. Our library allows researchers and practitioners to leverage adapter modularity through composition blocks, enabling the design of complex adapter setups. We demonstrate the library's efficacy by evaluating its performance against full fine-tuning on various NLP tasks. Adapters provides a powerful tool for addressing the challenges of conventional fine-tuning paradigms and promoting more efficient and modular transfer learning. The library is available via https://adapterhub.ml/adapters.
Selectivity Drives Productivity: Efficient Dataset Pruning for Enhanced Transfer Learning
Zhang, Yihua, Zhang, Yimeng, Chen, Aochuan, Jia, Jinghan, Liu, Jiancheng, Liu, Gaowen, Hong, Mingyi, Chang, Shiyu, Liu, Sijia
Massive data is often considered essential for deep learning applications, but it also incurs significant computational and infrastructural costs. Therefore, dataset pruning (DP) has emerged as an effective way to improve data efficiency by identifying and removing redundant training samples without sacrificing performance. In this work, we aim to address the problem of DP for transfer learning, i.e., how to prune a source dataset for improved pretraining efficiency and lossless finetuning accuracy on downstream target tasks. To our best knowledge, the problem of DP for transfer learning remains open, as previous studies have primarily addressed DP and transfer learning as separate problems. By contrast, we establish a unified viewpoint to integrate DP with transfer learning and find that existing DP methods are not suitable for the transfer learning paradigm. We then propose two new DP methods, label mapping and feature mapping, for supervised and self-supervised pretraining settings respectively, by revisiting the DP problem through the lens of source-target domain mapping. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on numerous transfer learning tasks. We show that source data classes can be pruned by up to 40% ~ 80% without sacrificing downstream performance, resulting in a significant 2 ~ 5 times speed-up during the pretraining stage. Besides, our proposal exhibits broad applicability and can improve other computationally intensive transfer learning techniques, such as adversarial pretraining. Codes are available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/DP4TL.
How To Train Your (Compressed) Large Language Model
Jha, Ananya Harsh, Sherborne, Tom, Walsh, Evan Pete, Groeneveld, Dirk, Strubell, Emma, Beltagy, Iz
With the increase in the size of large language models (LLMs), we need compression methods that can reduce the model size while preserving the generality and zero-shot promptability of the model. This goal is more ambitious than the typical compression setup, which reduces the model's size at the expense of specializing it to a specific end-task. To study this, we develop a task-agnostic compression pipeline with a large-scale evaluation comprising language modeling perplexity and 12 zero-shot end-tasks. Our results show that a simple layer-wise pruning followed by continued language model pretraining matches or outperforms three existing state-of-the-art baselines while being 1.5x more computationally efficient. However, unlike typical task-specialized compression, our best-compressed model significantly underperforms a similar-sized model trained from scratch. We posit the half-sized pretrained model as an upper bound for task-agnostic compression and call for future work to bridge this gap under a reasonable token budget. Our findings highlight the inadequacy of existing compression methods for LLMs and establish a requirement for new methods that preserve a model's generality and zero-shot promptability under compression. We release our code and evaluation setup to facilitate reproducibility and help iterate on method design.
Graph Learning and Its Advancements on Large Language Models: A Holistic Survey
Wei, Shaopeng, Zhao, Yu, Chen, Xingyan, Li, Qing, Zhuang, Fuzhen, Liu, Ji, Ren, Fuji, Kou, Gang
Graph learning is a prevalent domain that endeavors to learn the intricate relationships among nodes and the topological structure of graphs. Over the years, graph learning has transcended from graph theory to graph data mining. With the advent of representation learning, it has attained remarkable performance in diverse scenarios. Owing to its extensive application prospects, graph learning attracts copious attention. While some researchers have accomplished impressive surveys on graph learning, they failed to connect related objectives, methods, and applications in a more coherent way. As a result, they did not encompass current ample scenarios and challenging problems due to the rapid expansion of graph learning. Particularly, large language models have recently had a disruptive effect on human life, but they also show relative weakness in structured scenarios. The question of how to make these models more powerful with graph learning remains open. Our survey focuses on the most recent advancements in integrating graph learning with pre-trained language models, specifically emphasizing their application within the domain of large language models. Different from previous surveys on graph learning, we provide a holistic review that analyzes current works from the perspective of graph structure, and discusses the latest applications, trends, and challenges in graph learning. Specifically, we commence by proposing a taxonomy and then summarize the methods employed in graph learning. We then provide a detailed elucidation of mainstream applications. Finally, we propose future directions.