Large language models have recently made tremendous progress in a variety of aspects, e.g., cross-task generalization, instruction following. Comprehensively evaluating the capability of large language models in multiple tasks is of great importance. In this paper, we propose M3KE, a Massive Multi-Level Multi-Subject Knowledge Evaluation benchmark, which is developed to measure knowledge acquired by Chinese large language models by testing their multitask accuracy in zero- and few-shot settings. We have collected 20,477 questions from 71 tasks. Our selection covers all major levels of Chinese education system, ranging from the primary school to college, as well as a wide variety of subjects, including humanities, history, politics, law, education, psychology, science, technology, art and religion. All questions are multiple-choice questions with four options, hence guaranteeing a standardized and unified assessment process. We've assessed a number of state-of-the-art open-source Chinese large language models on the proposed benchmark. The size of these models varies from 335M to 130B parameters. Experiment results demonstrate that they perform significantly worse than GPT-3.5 that reaches an accuracy of ~ 48% on M3KE. The dataset is available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/M3KE.

While Reinforcement Learning can achieve impressive results for complex tasks, the learned policies are generally prone to fail in downstream tasks with even minor model mismatch or unexpected perturbations. Recent works have demonstrated that a policy population with diverse behavior characteristics can generalize to downstream environments with various discrepancies. However, such policies might result in catastrophic damage during the deployment in practical scenarios like real-world systems due to the unrestricted behaviors of trained policies. Furthermore, training diverse policies without regulation of the behavior can result in inadequate feasible policies for extrapolating to a wide range of test conditions with dynamics shifts. In this work, we aim to train diverse policies under the regularization of the behavior patterns. We motivate our paradigm by observing the inverse dynamics in the environment with partial state information and propose Diversity in Regulation (DiR) training diverse policies with regulated behaviors to discover desired patterns that benefit the generalization. Considerable empirical results on various variations of different environments indicate that our method attains improvements over other diversity-driven counterparts.

We propose an online learning algorithm for a class of machine learning models under a separable stochastic approximation framework. The essence of our idea lies in the observation that certain parameters in the models are easier to optimize than others. In this paper, we focus on models where some parameters have a linear nature, which is common in machine learning. In one routine of the proposed algorithm, the linear parameters are updated by the recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm, which is equivalent to a stochastic Newton method; then, based on the updated linear parameters, the nonlinear parameters are updated by the stochastic gradient method (SGD). The proposed algorithm can be understood as a stochastic approximation version of block coordinate gradient descent approach in which one part of the parameters is updated by a second-order SGD method while the other part is updated by a first-order SGD. Global convergence of the proposed online algorithm for non-convex cases is established in terms of the expected violation of a first-order optimality condition. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method accelerates convergence significantly and produces more robust training and test performance when compared to other popular learning algorithms. Moreover, our algorithm is less sensitive to the learning rate and outperforms the recently proposed slimTrain algorithm (Newman et al., 2022). The code has been uploaded to GitHub for validation.

Pretrained language models (LMs) have shown compelling performance on various downstream tasks, but unfortunately they require a tremendous amount of inference compute. Knowledge distillation finds a path to compress LMs to small ones with a teacher-student paradigm. However, when the capacity gap between the teacher and the student is large, a curse of capacity gap appears, invoking a deficiency in distilling LMs. While a few studies have been carried out to fill the gap, the curse is not yet well tackled. In this paper, we aim at lifting the curse of capacity gap via enlarging the capacity of the student without notably increasing the inference compute. Largely motivated by sparse activation regime of mixture of experts (MoE), we propose a mixture of minimal experts (MiniMoE), which imposes extra parameters to the student but introduces almost no additional inference compute. Experimental results on GLUE and CoNLL demonstrate the curse of capacity gap is lifted by the magic of MiniMoE to a large extent. MiniMoE also achieves the state-of-the-art performance at small FLOPs compared with a range of competitive baselines. With a compression rate as much as $\sim$50$\times$, MiniMoE preserves $\sim$95\% GLUE score of the teacher.

Network binarization emerges as one of the most promising compression approaches offering extraordinary computation and memory savings by minimizing the bit-width. However, recent research has shown that applying existing binarization algorithms to diverse tasks, architectures, and hardware in realistic scenarios is still not straightforward. Common challenges of binarization, such as accuracy degradation and efficiency limitation, suggest that its attributes are not fully understood. To close this gap, we present BiBench, a rigorously designed benchmark with in-depth analysis for network binarization. We first carefully scrutinize the requirements of binarization in the actual production and define evaluation tracks and metrics for a comprehensive and fair investigation. Then, we evaluate and analyze a series of milestone binarization algorithms that function at the operator level and with extensive influence. Our benchmark reveals that 1) the binarized operator has a crucial impact on the performance and deployability of binarized networks; 2) the accuracy of binarization varies significantly across different learning tasks and neural architectures; 3) binarization has demonstrated promising efficiency potential on edge devices despite the limited hardware support. The results and analysis also lead to a promising paradigm for accurate and efficient binarization. We believe that BiBench will contribute to the broader adoption of binarization and serve as a foundation for future research. The code for our BiBench is released https://github.com/htqin/BiBench .

This paper argues that Machine Learning (ML) algorithms must be educated. ML-trained algorithms' moral decisions are ubiquitous in human society. Sometimes reverting the societal advances governments, NGOs and civil society have achieved with great effort in the last decades or are yet on the path to be achieved. While their decisions have an incommensurable impact on human societies, these algorithms are within the least educated agents known (data incomplete, un-inclusive, or biased). ML algorithms are not something separate from our human idiosyncrasy but an enactment of our most implicit prejudices and biases. Some research is devoted to "responsibility assignment" as a strategy to tackle immoral AI behaviour. Yet this paper argues that the solution for AI ethical decision-making resides in algorithm education" (as opposed to the "training") of ML. Drawing from an analogy between ML and child education for social responsibility, the paper offers clear directions for responsible and sustainable AI design, specifically with respect to how to educate algorithms to decide ethically.

Soft robots show compliance and have infinite degrees of freedom. Thanks to these properties, such robots are leveraged for surgery, rehabilitation, biomimetics, unstructured environment exploring, and industrial gripper. In this case, they attract scholars from a variety of areas. However, nonlinearity and hysteresis effects also bring a burden to robot modeling. Moreover, following their flexibility and adaptation, soft robot control is more challenging than rigid robot control. In order to model and control soft robots, a large number of data models are utilized in pairs or separately. This review classifies these applied data models into five kinds, which are the Jacobian model, analytical model, statistical model, neural network, and reinforcement learning, and compares the modeling and controller features, e.g., model dynamics, data requirement, and target task, within and among these categories. A discussion about the development of the existing modeling and control approaches is presented, and we forecast that the combination of offline-trained and online-learning controllers will be the widespread implementation in the future.

Models trained with empirical risk minimization (ERM) are revealed to easily rely on spurious correlations, resulting in poor generalization. Group distributionally robust optimization (group DRO) can alleviate this problem by minimizing the worst-case loss over pre-defined groups. While promising, in practice factors like expensive annotations and privacy preclude the availability of group labels. More crucially, when taking a closer look at the failure modes of out-of-distribution generalization, the typical procedure of reweighting in group DRO loses efficiency. Hinged on the limitations, in this work, we reformulate the group DRO framework by proposing Q-Diversity. Characterized by an interactive training mode, Q-Diversity relaxes the group identification from annotation into direct parameterization. Furthermore, a novel mixing strategy across groups is presented to diversify the under-represented groups. In a series of experiments on both synthetic and real-world text classification tasks, results demonstrate that Q-Diversity can consistently improve worst-case accuracy under different distributional shifts, outperforming state-of-the-art alternatives.

Pre-training on large corpora of text enables the language models to acquire a vast amount of factual and commonsense knowledge which allows them to achieve remarkable performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. They typically acquire this knowledge by learning from the pre-training text and capturing certain patterns from it. However, real-world settings often present scenarios that do not abide by these patterns i.e. scenarios that break the common assumptions. Can state-of-the-art NLP models correctly reason over the contexts of such scenarios? Addressing the above question, in this paper, we investigate the ability of models to correctly reason over contexts that break the common assumptions. To this end, we first systematically create evaluation data in which each data instance consists of (a) a common assumption, (b) a context that follows the assumption, (c) a context that breaks the assumption, and (d) questions based on the contexts. Then, through evaluations on multiple models including GPT-3 and Flan T5, we show that while doing fairly well on contexts that follow the common assumptions, the models struggle to correctly reason over contexts that break those assumptions. Specifically, the performance gap is as high as 20% absolute points. Furthermore, we thoroughly analyze these results revealing several interesting findings. We believe our work and findings will encourage and facilitate further research in developing more robust models that can also reliably reason over contexts that break the common assumptions. Data is available at \url{https://github.com/nrjvarshney/break_the_common_assumptions}.

The VNHSGE (VietNamese High School Graduation Examination) dataset, developed exclusively for evaluating large language models (LLMs), is introduced in this article. The dataset, which covers nine subjects, was generated from the Vietnamese National High School Graduation Examination and comparable tests. 300 literary essays have been included, and there are over 19,000 multiple-choice questions on a range of topics. The dataset assesses LLMs in multitasking situations such as question answering, text generation, reading comprehension, visual question answering, and more by including both textual data and accompanying images. Using ChatGPT and BingChat, we evaluated LLMs on the VNHSGE dataset and contrasted their performance with that of Vietnamese students to see how well they performed. The results show that ChatGPT and BingChat both perform at a human level in a number of areas, including literature, English, history, geography, and civics education. They still have space to grow, though, especially in the areas of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. The VNHSGE dataset seeks to provide an adequate benchmark for assessing the abilities of LLMs with its wide-ranging coverage and variety of activities. We intend to promote future developments in the creation of LLMs by making this dataset available to the scientific community, especially in resolving LLMs' limits in disciplines involving mathematics and the natural sciences.