When using large language models (LLMs) in high-stakes applications, we need to know when we can trust their predictions. Some works argue that prompting high-performance LLMs is sufficient to produce calibrated uncertainties, while others introduce sampling methods that can be prohibitively expensive. In this work, we first argue that prompting on its own is insufficient to achieve good calibration and then show that fine-tuning on a small dataset of correct and incorrect answers can create an uncertainty estimate with good generalization and small computational overhead. We show that a thousand graded examples are sufficient to outperform baseline methods and that training through the features of a model is necessary for good performance and tractable for large open-source models when using LoRA. We also investigate the mechanisms that enable reliable LLM uncertainty estimation, finding that many models can be used as general-purpose uncertainty estimators, applicable not just to their own uncertainties but also the uncertainty of other models. Lastly, we show that uncertainty estimates inform human use of LLMs in human-AI collaborative settings through a user study.

Large language models (LLMs) are considered a crucial technology for advancing intelligent education since they exhibit the potential for an in-depth understanding of teaching scenarios and providing students with personalized guidance. Nonetheless, current LLM-based application in personalized teaching predominantly follows a Question-Answering paradigm, where students are passively provided with answers and explanations. In this paper, we propose SocraticLM, which achieves a Socratic Thought-Provoking teaching paradigm that fulfills the role of a real classroom teacher in actively engaging students in the thought process required for genuine problem-solving mastery. To build SocraticLM, we first propose a novel Dean-Teacher-Student multi-agent pipeline to construct a new dataset, SocraTeach, which contains $35$K meticulously crafted Socratic-style multi-round (equivalent to $208$K single-round) teaching dialogues grounded in fundamental mathematical problems. Our dataset simulates authentic teaching scenarios, interacting with six representative types of simulated students with different cognitive states, and strengthening four crucial teaching abilities. SocraticLM is then fine-tuned on SocraTeach with three strategies balancing its teaching and reasoning abilities. Moreover, we contribute a comprehensive evaluation system encompassing five pedagogical dimensions for assessing the teaching quality of LLMs. Extensive experiments verify that SocraticLM achieves significant improvements in the teaching performance, outperforming GPT4 by more than 12\%.

Large language models (LLMs) for code are typically trained to align with natural language instructions to closely follow their intentions and requirements. However, in many practical scenarios, it becomes increasingly challenging for these models to navigate the intricate boundary between helpfulness and safety, especially against highly complex yet potentially malicious instructions. In this work, we introduce INDICT: a new framework that empowers LLMs with Internal Dialogues of Critiques for both safety and helpfulness guidance. The internal dialogue is a dual cooperative system between a safety-driven critic and a helpfulness-driven critic. Each critic provides analysis against the given task and corresponding generated response, equipped with external knowledge queried through relevant code snippets and tools like web search and code interpreter. We engage the dual critic system in both code generation stage as well as code execution stage, providing preemptive and post-hoc guidance respectively to LLMs. We evaluated INDICT on 8 diverse tasks across 8 programming languages from 5 benchmarks, using LLMs from 7B to 70B parameters. We observed that our approach can provide an advanced level of critiques of both safety and helpfulness analysis, significantly improving the quality of output codes (+10% absolute improvements in all models).

This simple, intuitive methodology allows autoregressive (AR) transformers to learn visual distributions fast and generalize well: VAR, for the first time, makes GPT-style AR models surpass diffusion transformers in image generation. On ImageNet 256x256 benchmark, VAR significantly improve AR baseline by improving Frechet inception distance (FID) from 18.65 to 1.73, inception score (IS) from 80.4 to 350.2, with around 20x faster inference speed. It is also empirically verified that VAR outperforms the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) in multiple dimensions including image quality, inference speed, data efficiency, and scalability. Scaling up VAR models exhibits clear power-law scaling laws similar to those observed in LLMs, with linear correlation coefficients near -0.998 as solid evidence.

Large language models (LLMs) have been observed to exhibit bias towards certain cultures due to the predominance of training data obtained from English corpora. Considering that multilingual cultural data is often expensive to procure, existing methodologies address this challenge through prompt engineering or culture-specific pre-training.

Current benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in medicine are primarily focused on question-answering involving domain knowledge and descriptive reasoning. While such qualitative capabilities are vital to medical diagnosis, in real-world scenarios, doctors frequently use clinical calculators that follow quantitative equations and rule-based reasoning paradigms for evidence-based decision support. To this end, we propose MedCalc-Bench, a first-of-its-kind dataset focused on evaluating the medical calculation capability of LLMs. MedCalc-Bench contains an evaluation set of over 1000 manually reviewed instances from 55 different medical calculation tasks. Each instance in MedCalc-Bench consists of a patient note, a question requesting to compute a specific medical value, a ground truth answer, and a step-by-step explanation showing how the answer is obtained. While our evaluation results show the potential of LLMs in this area, none of them are effective enough for clinical settings. Common issues include extracting the incorrect entities, not using the correct equation or rules for a calculation task, or incorrectly performing the arithmetic for the computation. We hope our study highlights the quantitative knowledge and reasoning gaps in LLMs within medical settings, encouraging future improvements of LLMs for various clinical calculation tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in code generation, but their generated code often suffers from inefficiency, resulting in longer execution times and higher memory consumption. To address this issue, we propose EffiLearner, a self-optimization framework that utilizes execution overhead profiles to improve the efficiency of LLM-generated code. EffiLearner first generates code using an LLM, then executes it locally to capture execution time and memory usage profiles. These profiles are fed back to the LLM, which then revises the code to reduce overhead. To evaluate the effectiveness of EffiLearner, we conduct extensive experiments on EffiBench and two commonly used code generation benchmarks with 16 open-source and 6 closed-source models. Our evaluation results demonstrate that through iterative self-optimization, EffiLearner significantly enhances the efficiency of LLM-generated code. For example, the execution time (ET) of StarCoder2-15B for the EffiBench decreases from 0.93 (s) to 0.12 (s) which reduces 87.1\% execution time requirement compared with the initial code. The total memory usage (TMU) of StarCoder2-15B also decreases from 22.02 (Mb s), which decreases 90.8\% total memory consumption during the execution process.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated the potential in acting as autonomous agents for sequential decision-making tasks. However, most existing methods either take actions greedily without planning or rely on static plans that are not adaptable to environmental feedback. Consequently, the sequential decision-making performance of LLM agents degenerates with problem complexity and plan horizons increase. We propose a closed-loop approach, AdaPlanner, which allows the LLM agent to refine its self-generated plan adaptively in response to environmental feedback.

The number of large language models (LLMs) with varying parameter scales and vocabularies is increasing. While they deliver powerful performance, they also face a set of common optimization needs to meet specific requirements or standards, such as instruction following or avoiding the output of sensitive information from the real world. However, how to reuse the fine-tuning outcomes of one model to other models to reduce training costs remains a challenge. To bridge this gap, we introduce Cross-model Control (CMC), a method that improves multiple LLMs in one-time training with a portable tiny language model. Specifically, we have observed that the logit shift before and after fine-tuning is remarkably similar across different models.

There is a growing interest in using Large Language Models (LLMs) in multi-agent systems to tackle interactive real-world tasks that require effective collaboration and assessing complex situations. Yet, we have a limited understanding of LLMs' communication and decision-making abilities in multi-agent setups.