Education
SEGO: Sequential Subgoal Optimization for Mathematical Problem-Solving
Zhao, Xueliang, Huang, Xinting, Bi, Wei, Kong, Lingpeng
Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven substantial progress in artificial intelligence in recent years, exhibiting impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, including mathematical problem-solving. Inspired by the success of subgoal-based methods, we propose a novel framework called SEquential subGoal Optimization (SEGO) to enhance LLMs' ability to solve mathematical problems. By establishing a connection between the subgoal breakdown process and the probability of solving problems, SEGO aims to identify better subgoals with theoretical guarantees. Addressing the challenge of identifying suitable subgoals in a large solution space, our framework generates problem-specific subgoals and adjusts them according to carefully designed criteria. Incorporating these optimized subgoals into the policy model training leads to significant improvements in problem-solving performance. We validate SEGO's efficacy through experiments on two benchmarks, GSM8K and MATH, where our approach outperforms existing methods, highlighting the potential of SEGO in AIdriven mathematical problem-solving. In recent years, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked a significant milestone in the field of artificial intelligence. Models such as ChatGPT and LLaMA have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks. Within this context, addressing mathematical problems has attracted considerable interest from researchers, as it serves as a prominent showcase of the reasoning capabilities inherent in LLMs.
Lost in Translation: When GPT-4V(ision) Can't See Eye to Eye with Text. A Vision-Language-Consistency Analysis of VLLMs and Beyond
Zhang, Xiang, Li, Senyu, Wu, Zijun, Shi, Ning
Recent advancements in multimodal techniques open exciting possibilities for models excelling in diverse tasks involving text, audio, and image processing. Models like GPT-4V, blending computer vision and language modeling, excel in complex text and image tasks. Numerous prior research endeavors have diligently examined the performance of these Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) across tasks like object detection, image captioning and others. However, these analyses often focus on evaluating the performance of each modality in isolation, lacking insights into their cross-modal interactions. Specifically, questions concerning whether these vision-language models execute vision and language tasks consistently or independently have remained unanswered. In this study, we draw inspiration from recent investigations into multilingualism and conduct a comprehensive analysis of model's cross-modal interactions. We introduce a systematic framework that quantifies the capability disparities between different modalities in the multi-modal setting and provide a set of datasets designed for these evaluations. Our findings reveal that models like GPT-4V tend to perform consistently modalities when the tasks are relatively simple. However, the trustworthiness of results derived from the vision modality diminishes as the tasks become more challenging. Expanding on our findings, we introduce "Vision Description Prompting," a method that effectively improves performance in challenging vision-related tasks.
KwaiYiiMath: Technical Report
Fu, Jiayi, Lin, Lei, Gao, Xiaoyang, Liu, Pengli, Chen, Zhengzong, Yang, Zhirui, Zhang, Shengnan, Zheng, Xue, Li, Yan, Liu, Yuliang, Ye, Xucheng, Liao, Yiqiao, Liao, Chao, Chen, Bin, Song, Chengru, Wan, Junchen, Lin, Zijia, Zhang, Fuzheng, Wang, Zhongyuan, Zhang, Di, Gai, Kun
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in handling a variety of natural language processing (NLP) downstream tasks, even on mathematical tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. Meanwhile, we also constructed a small-scale Chinese primary school mathematics test set (named KMath), consisting of 188 examples to evaluate the correctness of the problem-solving process generated by the models. Empirical studies demonstrate that KwaiYiiMath can achieve stateof-the-art (SOTA) performance on GSM8k, CMath, and KMath compared with the similar size models, respectively. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the natural language processing (NLP) landscape Kenton & Toutanova (2019); Brown et al. (2020), where scaling up model size and the amount of data is one of the key ingredients Rae et al. (2021); Chowdhery et al. (2022); Anil et al. (2023); Touvron et al. (2023a;b). Surprisingly, recent progress suggests that LLMs also have the potential to solve reasoning problems Clark et al. (2020); Talmor et al. (2020); Suzgun et al. (2022); Wei et al. (2022b). In this report, we focus on how to enhance the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLM through an alignment process that includes supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Specifically, we introduce the KwaiYiiMath which is finetuned with human alignment techniques from KwaiYiiBase to tackle mathematical problems. Experimental results show that KwaiYiiMath outperforms many open-source models in similar sizes by a large margin and is approaching GPT-4 on three mathematical benchmarks including both English and Chinese, i.e., GSM8k Cobbe et al. (2021), CMath Wei et al. (2023), and a small-scale in-house dataset KMath. KwaiYiiBase is a large language model developed by Kuaishou https://github.com/kwai/KwaiYii/. Section 3 introduces the methodology of KwaiYiiMath including the process of supervised fine-tuning and human preference alignment. Additionally, it also describes details about the efforts in collecting large amounts of mathematical high-quality training data.
Unleashing the Multilingual Encoder Potential: Boosting Zero-Shot Performance via Probability Calibration
Nie, Ercong, Schmid, Helmut, Schütze, Hinrich
Pretrained multilingual encoder models can directly perform zero-shot multilingual tasks or linguistic probing by reformulating the input examples into cloze-style prompts. This is accomplished by predicting the probabilities of the label words at the masked token position, without requiring any updates to the model parameters. However, the performance of this method is limited by the model's bias toward predicting label words which frequently occurred during the pretraining. These words typically receive high probabilities. To address this issue, we combine the models with calibration techniques which modify the probabilities of label words predicted by the models. We first validate the effectiveness of a proposed simple calibration method together with other existing techniques on monolingual encoders in both zero- and few-shot scenarios. We subsequently employ these calibration techniques on multilingual encoders, resulting in substantial performance improvements across a wide range of tasks.
NLPBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Solving NLP Problems
Song, Linxin, Zhang, Jieyu, Cheng, Lechao, Zhou, Pengyuan, Zhou, Tianyi, Li, Irene
Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in enhancing the capabilities of natural language processing (NLP). Despite these successes, there remains a dearth of research dedicated to the NLP problem-solving abilities of LLMs. To fill the gap in this area, we present a unique benchmarking dataset, NLPBench, comprising 378 college-level NLP questions spanning various NLP topics sourced from Yale University's prior final exams. NLPBench includes questions with context, in which multiple sub-questions share the same public information, and diverse question types, including multiple choice, short answer, and math. Our evaluation, centered on LLMs such as GPT-3.5/4, PaLM-2, and LLAMA-2, incorporates advanced prompting strategies like the chain-of-thought (CoT) and tree-of-thought (ToT). Our study reveals that the effectiveness of the advanced prompting strategies can be inconsistent, occasionally damaging LLM performance, especially in smaller models like the LLAMA-2 (13b). Furthermore, our manual assessment illuminated specific shortcomings in LLMs' scientific problem-solving skills, with weaknesses in logical decomposition and reasoning notably affecting results.
Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model
Li, Kenneth, Patel, Oam, Viégas, Fernanda, Pfister, Hanspeter, Wattenberg, Martin
We introduce Inference-Time Intervention (ITI), a technique designed to enhance the "truthfulness" of large language models (LLMs). ITI operates by shifting model activations during inference, following a set of directions across a limited number of attention heads. This intervention significantly improves the performance of LLaMA models on the TruthfulQA benchmark. On an instruction-finetuned LLaMA called Alpaca, ITI improves its truthfulness from 32.5% to 65.1%. We identify a trade-off between truthfulness and helpfulness and demonstrate how to balance it by tuning the intervention strength. ITI is minimally invasive and computationally inexpensive. Moreover, the technique is data efficient: while approaches like RLHF require extensive annotations, ITI locates truthful directions using only few hundred examples. Our findings suggest that LLMs may have an internal representation of the likelihood of something being true, even as they produce falsehoods on the surface.
Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models
Wang, Guanzhi, Xie, Yuqi, Jiang, Yunfan, Mandlekar, Ajay, Xiao, Chaowei, Zhu, Yuke, Fan, Linxi, Anandkumar, Anima
We introduce Voyager, the first LLM-powered embodied lifelong learning agent in Minecraft that continuously explores the world, acquires diverse skills, and makes novel discoveries without human intervention. Voyager consists of three key components: 1) an automatic curriculum that maximizes exploration, 2) an ever-growing skill library of executable code for storing and retrieving complex behaviors, and 3) a new iterative prompting mechanism that incorporates environment feedback, execution errors, and self-verification for program improvement. Voyager interacts with GPT-4 via blackbox queries, which bypasses the need for model parameter fine-tuning. The skills developed by Voyager are temporally extended, interpretable, and compositional, which compounds the agent's abilities rapidly and alleviates catastrophic forgetting. Empirically, Voyager shows strong in-context lifelong learning capability and exhibits exceptional proficiency in playing Minecraft. It obtains 3.3x more unique items, travels 2.3x longer distances, and unlocks key tech tree milestones up to 15.3x faster than prior SOTA. Voyager is able to utilize the learned skill library in a new Minecraft world to solve novel tasks from scratch, while other techniques struggle to generalize. We open-source our full codebase and prompts at https://voyager.minedojo.org/.
DisCo: Distilled Student Models Co-training for Semi-supervised Text Mining
Jiang, Weifeng, Mao, Qianren, Lin, Chenghua, Li, Jianxin, Deng, Ting, Yang, Weiyi, Wang, Zheng
Many text mining models are constructed by fine-tuning a large deep pre-trained language model (PLM) in downstream tasks. However, a significant challenge nowadays is maintaining performance when we use a lightweight model with limited labelled samples. We present DisCo, a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework for fine-tuning a cohort of small student models generated from a large PLM using knowledge distillation. Our key insight is to share complementary knowledge among distilled student cohorts to promote their SSL effectiveness. DisCo employs a novel co-training technique to optimize a cohort of multiple small student models by promoting knowledge sharing among students under diversified views: model views produced by different distillation strategies and data views produced by various input augmentations. We evaluate DisCo on both semi-supervised text classification and extractive summarization tasks. Experimental results show that DisCo can produce student models that are 7.6 times smaller and 4.8 times faster in inference than the baseline PLMs while maintaining comparable performance. We also show that DisCo-generated student models outperform the similar-sized models elaborately tuned in distinct tasks.
Prompting with Pseudo-Code Instructions
Mishra, Mayank, Kumar, Prince, Bhat, Riyaz, Murthy, Rudra V, Contractor, Danish, Tamilselvam, Srikanth
Prompting with natural language instructions has recently emerged as a popular method of harnessing the capabilities of large language models. Given the inherent ambiguity present in natural language, it is intuitive to consider the possible advantages of prompting with less ambiguous prompt styles, such as the use of pseudo-code. In this paper we explore if prompting via pseudo-code instructions helps improve the performance of pre-trained language models. We manually create a dataset of pseudo-code prompts for 132 different tasks spanning classification, QA and generative language tasks, sourced from the Super-NaturalInstructions dataset. Using these prompts along with their counterparts in natural language, we study their performance on two LLM families - BLOOM and CodeGen. Our experiments show that using pseudo-code instructions leads to better results, with an average increase (absolute) of 7-16 points in F1 scores for classification tasks and an improvement (relative) of 12-38% in aggregate ROUGE-L scores across all tasks. We include detailed ablation studies which indicate that code comments, docstrings, and the structural clues encoded in pseudo-code all contribute towards the improvement in performance. To the best of our knowledge our work is the first to demonstrate how pseudo-code prompts can be helpful in improving the performance of pre-trained LMs.
Can NLI Provide Proper Indirect Supervision for Low-resource Biomedical Relation Extraction?
Xu, Jiashu, Ma, Mingyu Derek, Chen, Muhao
Two key obstacles in biomedical relation extraction (RE) are the scarcity of annotations and the prevalence of instances without explicitly pre-defined labels due to low annotation coverage. Existing approaches, which treat biomedical RE as a multi-class classification task, often result in poor generalization in low-resource settings and do not have the ability to make selective prediction on unknown cases but give a guess from seen relations, hindering the applicability of those approaches. We present NBR, which converts biomedical RE as natural language inference formulation through indirect supervision. By converting relations to natural language hypotheses, NBR is capable of exploiting semantic cues to alleviate annotation scarcity. By incorporating a ranking-based loss that implicitly calibrates abstinent instances, NBR learns a clearer decision boundary and is instructed to abstain on uncertain instances. Extensive experiments on three widely-used biomedical RE benchmarks, namely ChemProt, DDI and GAD, verify the effectiveness of NBR in both full-set and low-resource regimes. Our analysis demonstrates that indirect supervision benefits biomedical RE even when a domain gap exists, and combining NLI knowledge with biomedical knowledge leads to the best performance gains.