Large Language Model
OneBit: Towards Extremely Low-bit Large Language Models
Model quantification uses low bit-width values to represent the weight matrices of existing models to be quantized, which is a promising approach to reduce both storage and computational overheads of deploying highly anticipated LLMs. However, current quantization methods suffer severe performance degradation when the bit-width is extremely reduced, and thus focus on utilizing 4-bit or 8-bit values to quantize models.
RouterDC: Query-Based Router by Dual Contrastive Learning for Assembling Large Language Models
Recent works show that assembling multiple off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) can harness their complementary abilities. To achieve this, routing is a promising method, which learns a router to select the most suitable LLM for each query. However, existing routing models are ineffective when multiple LLMs perform well for a query. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a method called query-based Router by Dual Contrastive learning (RouterDC). The RouterDC model, which consists of an encoder and LLM embeddings, is trained by two proposed contrastive losses (sample-LLM and sample-sample losses). Experimental results show that RouterDC is effective in assembling LLMs and largely outperforms individual top-performing LLMs as well as existing routing methods on both in-distribution (+2.76\%) and out-of-distribution (+1.90\%) tasks.
cPAPERS: A Dataset of Situated and Multimodal Interactive Conversations in Scientific Papers
An emerging area of research in situated and multimodal interactive conversations (SIMMC) includes interactions in scientific papers. Since scientific papers are primarily composed of text, equations, figures, and tables, SIMMC methods must be developed specifically for each component to support the depth of inquiry and interactions required by research scientists. This work introduces $Conversational Papers$ (cPAPERS), a dataset of conversational question-answer pairs from reviews of academic papers grounded in these paper components and their associated references from scientific documents available on arXiv. We present a data collection strategy to collect these question-answer pairs from OpenReview and associate them with contextual information from $LaTeX$ source files. Additionally, we present a series of baseline approaches utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) in both zero-shot and fine-tuned configurations to address the cPAPERS dataset.
Dual Risk Minimization: Towards Next-Level Robustness in Fine-tuning Zero-Shot Models
Fine-tuning foundation models often compromises their robustness to distribution shifts. To remedy this, most robust fine-tuning methods aim to preserve the pre-trained features. However, not all pre-trained features are robust and those methods are largely indifferent to which ones to preserve. We propose dual risk minimization (DRM), which combines empirical risk minimization with worst-case risk minimization, to better preserve the core features of downstream tasks. In particular, we utilize core-feature descriptions generated by LLMs to induce core-based zero-shot predictions which then serve as proxies to estimate the worst-case risk. DRM balances two crucial aspects of model robustness: expected performance and worst-case performance, establishing a new state of the art on various real-world benchmarks. DRM significantly improves the out-of-distribution performance of CLIP ViT-L/14@336 on ImageNet (75.9$\to$77.1),
Listenable Maps for Zero-Shot Audio Classifiers
Interpreting the decisions of deep learning models, including audio classifiers, is crucial for ensuring the transparency and trustworthiness of this technology. In this paper, we introduce LMAC-ZS (Listenable Maps for Zero-Shot Audio Classifiers), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first decoder-based post-hoc explanation method for explaining the decisions of zero-shot audio classifiers. The proposed method utilizes a novel loss function that aims to closely reproduce the original similarity patterns between text-and-audio pairs in the generated explanations. We provide an extensive evaluation using the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) model to showcase that our interpreter remains faithful to the decisions in a zero-shot classification context. Moreover, we qualitatively show that our method produces meaningful explanations that correlate well with different text prompts.
CulturePark: Boosting Cross-cultural Understanding in Large Language Models
Cultural bias is pervasive in many large language models (LLMs), largely due to the deficiency of data representative of different cultures.Typically, cultural datasets and benchmarks are constructed either by extracting subsets of existing datasets or by aggregating from platforms such as Wikipedia and social media.However, these approaches are highly dependent on real-world data and human annotations, making them costly and difficult to scale.Inspired by cognitive theories on social communication, this paper introduces CulturePark, an LLM-powered multi-agent communication framework for cultural data collection.CulturePark simulates cross-cultural human communication with LLM-based agents playing roles in different cultures.It generates high-quality cross-cultural dialogues encapsulating human beliefs, norms, and customs.Using CulturePark, we generated 41,000 cultural samples to fine-tune eight culture-specific LLMs.We evaluated these models across three downstream tasks: content moderation, cultural alignment, and cultural education.Results show that for content moderation, our GPT-3.5-based
Microstructures and Accuracy of Graph Recall by Large Language Models
Graphs data is crucial for many applications, and much of it exists in the relations described in textual format. As a result, being able to accurately recall and encode a graph described in earlier text is a basic yet pivotal ability that LLMs need to demonstrate if they are to perform reasoning tasks that involve graph-structured information. Human performance at graph recall by has been studied by cognitive scientists for decades, and has been found to often exhibit certain structural patterns of bias that align with human handling of social relationships. To date, however, we know little about how LLMs behave in analogous graph recall tasks: do their recalled graphs also exhibit certain biased patterns, and if so, how do they compare with humans and affect other graph reasoning tasks? In this work, we perform the first systematical study of graph recall by LLMs, investigating the accuracy and biased microstructures (local structural patterns) in their recall. We find that LLMs not only underperform often in graph recall, but also tend to favor more triangles and alternating 2-paths. Moreover, we find that more advanced LLMs have a striking dependence on the domain that a real-world graph comes from --- by yielding the best recall accuracy when the graph is narrated in a language style consistent with its original domain.
Safe LoRA: The Silver Lining of Reducing Safety Risks when Finetuning Large Language Models
While large language models (LLMs) such as Llama-2 or GPT-4 have shown impressive zero-shot performance, fine-tuning is still necessary to enhance their performance for customized datasets, domain-specific tasks, or other private needs. However, fine-tuning all parameters of LLMs requires significant hardware resources, which can be impractical for typical users. Therefore, parameter-efficient fine-tuning such as LoRA have emerged, allowing users to fine-tune LLMs without the need for considerable computing resources, with little performance degradation compared to fine-tuning all parameters. Unfortunately, recent studies indicate that fine-tuning can increase the risk to the safety of LLMs, even when data does not contain malicious content. To address this challenge, we propose $\textsf{Safe LoRA}$, a simple one-liner patch to the original LoRA implementation by introducing the projection of LoRA weights from selected layers to the safety-aligned subspace, effectively reducing the safety risks in LLM fine-tuning while maintaining utility. It is worth noting that $\textsf{Safe LoRA}$ is a training-free and data-free approach, as it only requires the knowledge of the weights from the base and aligned LLMs. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that when fine-tuning on purely malicious data, $\textsf{Safe LoRA}$ retains similar safety performance as the original aligned model. Moreover, when the fine-tuning dataset contains a mixture of both benign and malicious data, $\textsf{Safe LoRA}$ mitigates the negative effect made by malicious data while preserving performance on downstream tasks. Our codes are available at https://github.com/IBM/SafeLoRA.
LLM-AutoDA: Large Language Model-Driven Automatic Data Augmentation for Long-tailed Problems
The long-tailed distribution is the underlying nature of real-world data, and it presents unprecedented challenges for training deep learning models. Existing long-tailed learning paradigms based on re-balancing or data augmentation have partially alleviated the long-tailed problem. However, they still have limitations, such as relying on manually designed augmentation strategies, having a limited search space, and using fixed augmentation strategies. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel LLM-based long-tailed data augmentation framework called LLM-AutoDA, which leverages large-scale pretrained models to automatically search for the optimal augmentation strategies suitable for long-tailed data distributions. In addition, it applies this strategy to the original imbalanced data to create an augmented dataset and fine-tune the underlying long-tailed learning model. The performance improvement on the validation set serves as a reward signal to update the generation model, enabling the generation of more effective augmentation strategies in the next iteration. We conducted extensive experiments on multiple mainstream long-tailed learning benchmarks. The results show that LLM-AutoDA outperforms state-of-the-art data augmentation methods and other re-balancing methods significantly.
ReST-MCTS*: LLM Self-Training via Process Reward Guided Tree Search
Recent methodologies in LLM self-training mostly rely on LLM generating responses and filtering those with correct output answers as training data. This approach often yields a low-quality fine-tuning training set (e.g., incorrect plans or intermediate reasoning). In this paper, we develop a reinforced self-training approach, called ReST-MCTS*, based on integrating process reward guidance with tree search MCTS* for collecting higher-quality reasoning traces as well as per-step value to train policy and reward models. ReST-MCTS* circumvents the per-step manual annotation typically used to train process rewards by tree-search-based reinforcement learning: Given oracle final correct answers, ReST-MCTS* is able to infer the correct process rewards by estimating the probability this step can help lead to the correct answer. These inferred rewards serve dual purposes: they act as value targets for further refining the process reward model and also facilitate the selection of high-quality traces for policy model self-training. We first show that the tree-search policy in ReST-MCTS* achieves higher accuracy compared with prior LLM reasoning baselines such as Best-of-N and Tree-of-Thought, within the same search budget. We then show that by using traces searched by this tree-search policy as training data, we can continuously enhance the three language models for multiple iterations, and outperform other self-training algorithms such as ReST$^\text{EM}$ and Self-Rewarding LM.