Large Language Model
ANAH-v2: Scaling Analytical Hallucination Annotation of Large Language Models
Current hallucination detection and mitigation datasets are limited in domain and size, which struggle to scale due to prohibitive labor costs and insufficient reliability of existing hallucination annotators. To facilitate the scalable oversight of LLM hallucinations, this paper introduces an iterative self-training framework that simultaneously and progressively scales up the annotation dataset and improves the accuracy of the annotator. Based on the Expectation Maximization algorithm, in each iteration, the framework first applies an automatic hallucination annotation pipeline for a scaled dataset and then trains a more accurate annotator on the dataset. This new annotator is adopted in the annotation pipeline for the next iteration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the finally obtained hallucination annotator with only 7B parameters surpasses GPT-4 and obtains new state-of-the-art hallucination detection results on HaluEval and HalluQA by zero-shot inference.
S {2} FT: Efficient, Scalable and Generalizable LLM Fine-tuning by Structured Sparsity
Current PEFT methods for LLMs can achieve high quality, efficient training, or scalable serving, but not all three simultaneously. To address this limitation, we investigate sparse fine-tuning and observe a remarkable improvement in generalization ability. Utilizing this key insight, we propose a family of Structured Sparse Fine-Tuning (S { 2} FT) methods for LLMs, which concurrently achieve state-of-the-art fine-tuning performance, training efficiency, and inference scalability. S { 2} FT accomplishes this by "selecting sparsely and computing densely". Based on the coupled structures in LLMs, \model selects a few attention heads and channels in the MHA and FFN modules for each Transformer block, respectively.
QTIP: Quantization with Trellises and Incoherence Processing
Post-training quantization (PTQ) reduces the memory footprint of LLMs by quantizing weights to low-precision datatypes.Since LLM inference is usually memory-bound, PTQ methods can improve inference throughput.Recent state-of-the-art PTQ approaches use vector quantization (VQ) to quantize multiple weights at once, which improves information utilization through better shaping.However, VQ requires a codebook with size exponential in the dimension.This limits current VQ-based PTQ works to low VQ dimensions ( \le 8) that in turn limit quantization quality.Here, we introduce QTIP, which instead uses trellis coded quantization (TCQ) to achieve ultra-high-dimensional quantization. TCQ uses a stateful decoder that separates the codebook size from the bitrate and effective dimension. QTIP introduces a spectrum of lookup-only to computed lookup-free trellis codes designed for a hardware-efficient "bitshift" trellis structure; these codes achieve state-of-the-art results in both quantization quality and inference speed.
HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models
In order to thrive in hostile and ever-changing natural environments, mammalian brains evolved to store large amounts of knowledge about the world and continually integrate new information while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Despite the impressive accomplishments, large language models (LLMs), even with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), still struggle to efficiently and effectively integrate a large amount of new experiences after pre-training. In this work, we introduce HippoRAG, a novel retrieval framework inspired by the hippocampal indexing theory of human long-term memory to enable deeper and more efficient knowledge integration over new experiences. HippoRAG synergistically orchestrates LLMs, knowledge graphs, and the Personalized PageRank algorithm to mimic the different roles of neocortex and hippocampus in human memory. We compare HippoRAG with existing RAG methods on multi-hop question answering (QA) and show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods remarkably, by up to 20%.
Benchmarking Generative Models on Computational Thinking Tests in Elementary Visual Programming
Generative models have demonstrated human-level proficiency in various benchmarks across domains like programming, natural sciences, and general knowledge. Despite these promising results on competitive benchmarks, they still struggle with seemingly simple problem-solving tasks typically carried out by elementary-level students. How do state-of-the-art models perform on standardized programming-related tests designed to assess computational thinking and problem-solving skills at schools? In this paper, we curate a novel benchmark involving computational thinking tests grounded in elementary visual programming domains. Our initial results show that state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o and Llama3 barely match the performance of an average school student.
Jailbreaking Large Language Models Against Moderation Guardrails via Cipher Characters
Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically harmless but remain vulnerable to carefully crafted prompts known as jailbreaks'', which can bypass protective measures and induce harmful behavior. Recent advancements in LLMs have incorporated moderation guardrails that can filter outputs, which trigger processing errors for certain malicious questions. Existing red-teaming benchmarks often neglect to include questions that trigger moderation guardrails, making it difficult to evaluate jailbreak effectiveness. To address this issue, we introduce JAMBench, a harmful behavior benchmark designed to trigger and evaluate moderation guardrails. JAMBench involves 160 manually crafted instructions covering four major risk categories at multiple severity levels.
Efficient LLM Scheduling by Learning to Rank
In Large Language Model (LLM) inference, the output length of an LLM request is typically regarded as not known a priori. Consequently, most LLM serving systems employ a simple First-come-first-serve (FCFS) scheduling strategy, leading to Head-Of-Line (HOL) blocking and reduced throughput and service quality. In this paper, we reexamine this assumption -- we show that, although predicting the exact generation length of each request is infeasible, it is possible to predict the relative ranks of output lengths in a batch of requests, using learning to rank. The ranking information offers valuable guidance for scheduling requests. Building on this insight, we develop a novel scheduler for LLM inference and serving that can approximate the shortest-job-first (SJF) schedule better than existing approaches. We integrate this scheduler with the state-of-the-art LLM serving system and show significant performance improvement in several important applications: 2.8x lower latency in chatbot serving and 6.5x higher throughput in synthetic data generation.
CLAVE: An Adaptive Framework for Evaluating Values of LLM Generated Responses
The rapid progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) poses potential risks such as generating unethical content. Assessing the values embedded in LLMs' generated responses can help expose their misalignment, but this relies on reference-free value evaluators, e.g. Nevertheless, two key challenges emerge in open-ended value evaluation: the evaluator should adapt to changing human value definitions with minimal annotation, against their own bias (adaptability); and remain robust across varying value expressions and scenarios (generalizability). To handle these challenges, we introduce CLAVE, a novel framework that integrates two complementary LLMs: a large model to extract high-level value concepts from diverse responses, leveraging its extensive knowledge and generalizability, and a small model fine-tuned on these concepts to adapt to human value annotations. This dual-model framework enables adaptation to any value system using 100 human-labeled samples per value type. We benchmark the performance of 15 popular LLM evaluators and fully analyze their strengths and weaknesses.
Train-Attention: Meta-Learning Where to Focus in Continual Knowledge Learning
Previous studies on continual knowledge learning (CKL) in large language models (LLMs) have predominantly focused on approaches such as regularization, architectural modifications, and rehearsal techniques to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, these methods naively inherit the inefficiencies of standard training procedures, indiscriminately applying uniform weight across all tokens, which can lead to unnecessary parameter updates and increased forgetting. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel CKL approach termed Train-Attention-Augmented Language Model (TAALM), which enhances learning efficiency by dynamically predicting and applying weights to tokens based on their usefulness. This method employs a meta-learning framework that optimizes token importance predictions, facilitating targeted knowledge updates and minimizing forgetting. Also, we observe that existing benchmarks do not clearly exhibit the trade-off between learning and retaining, therefore we propose a new benchmark, LAMA-ckl, to address this issue.
Teach Better or Show Smarter? On Instructions and Exemplars in Automatic Prompt Optimization
Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but their performance is heavily reliant on effective prompt engineering. Automatic prompt optimization (APO) methods are designed to automate this and can be broadly categorized into those targeting instructions (instruction optimization, IO) vs. those targeting exemplars (exemplar optimization, EO). Despite their shared objective, these have evolved rather independently, with IO receiving more research attention recently. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by comprehensively comparing the performance of representative IO and EO techniques both isolation and combination on a diverse set of challenging tasks. Our findings reveal that intelligently reusing model-generated input-output pairs obtained from evaluating prompts on the validation set as exemplars, consistently improves performance on top of IO methods but is currently under-investigated.