State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive problemsolving capabilities but may struggle with complex reasoning and factual correctness. Existing methods harness the strengths of chain-of-thought (CoT) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to decompose a complex problem into simpler steps and apply retrieval to improve factual correctness. These methods work well on straightforward reasoning tasks but often falter on challenging tasks such as competitive programming and mathematics, due to frequent reasoning errors and irrelevant knowledge retrieval. To address this, we introduce Critic-guided planning with Retrieval-augmentation, CR-Planner, a novel framework that leverages fine-tuned critic models to guide both reasoning and retrieval processes through planning. CR-Planner solves a problem by iteratively selecting and executing sub-goals. Initially, it identifies the most promising sub-goal from reasoning, query generation, and retrieval, guided by rewards given by a critic model named sub-goal critic. It then executes this sub-goal through sampling and selecting the optimal output based on evaluations from another critic model named execution critic. This iterative process, informed by retrieved information and critic models, enables CR-Planner to effectively navigate the solution space towards the final answer. We employ Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to collect the data for training the critic models, allowing for a systematic exploration of action sequences and their long-term impacts. Our experiments demonstrate that CR-Planner significantly outperforms baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in addressing challenging problems by improving both reasoning and retrieval. Existing approaches (Yao et al., 2023b; Zhao et al., 2023b; Li et al., 2024) seek to harness the strengths of both chain-ofthought (CoT) reasoning (Wei et al., 2022) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) (Lewis et al., 2020) on knowledge-intensive complex reasoning problems.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have exhibited impressive capability. However, recently many deficiencies of MLLMs have been found compared to human intelligence, e.g., hallucination. To drive the MLLMs study, the community dedicated efforts to building larger benchmarks with complex tasks. In this paper, we propose benchmarking an essential but usually overlooked intelligence: association, a human's basic capability to link observation and prior practice memory. To comprehensively investigate MLLM's performance on the association, we formulate the association task and devise a standard benchmark based on adjective and verb semantic concepts. Instead of costly data annotation and curation, we propose a convenient annotation-free construction method transforming the general dataset for our association tasks. Simultaneously, we devise a rigorous data refinement process to eliminate confusion in the raw dataset. Building on this database, we establish three levels of association tasks: singlestep, synchronous, and asynchronous associations. Moreover, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into the MLLMs' zero-shot association capabilities, addressing multiple dimensions, including three distinct memory strategies, both open-source and closed-source MLLMs, cutting-edge Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, and the involvement of human experts. Our systematic investigation shows that current open-source MLLMs consistently exhibit poor capability in our association tasks, even the currently state-of-the-art GPT-4V(vision) also has a significant gap compared to humans. We believe our benchmark would pave the way for future MLLM studies. Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently made significant breakthroughs in perceiving diverse modality input and solving a broad range of tasks Zhang et al. (2024a); Carolan et al. (2024). As GPT-4V(ision) Achiam et al. (2023) and Gemini Team et al. (2023); Reid et al. (2024) address challenges that researchers have been exploring for a considerable period. Subsequently, numerous researchers have developed diverse open-source MLLMs AI et al. (2024); Bai et al. (2023b); Wang et al. (2024b); Dong et al. (2024); Liu et al. (2023a); Li et al. (2024a); Ye et al. (2023; 2024). These models usually use the Large Language Model (LLM) as the core component and expand to multi-modal with a specific module Yin et al. (2023) that transfers multi-modal tokens into language tokens, achieving alignment between different modality encoders. MLLMs demonstrated ability in visual reasoning, which requires understanding the input query and then making judgments based on the visual content. Much prior work has been dedicated to evaluating the levels of their visual reasoning capabilities. However, to the best of our knowledge, how to evaluate the association ability of MLLMs is overlooked.

Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) involves answering natural language questions by leveraging structured information stored in a knowledge graph. Typically, KGQA initially retrieve a targeted subgraph from a large-scale knowledge graph, which serves as the basis for reasoning models to address queries. However, the retrieved subgraph inevitably brings distraction information for knowledge utilization, impeding the model's ability to perform accurate reasoning. To address this issue, we propose a Question-guided Knowledge Graph Re-scoring method (Q-KGR) to eliminate noisy pathways for the input question, thereby focusing specifically on pertinent factual knowledge. Moreover, we introduce Knowformer, a parameter-efficient method for injecting the re-scored knowledge graph into large language models to enhance their ability to perform factual reasoning. Extensive experiments on multiple KGQA benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing systems.

Counterspeech presents a viable alternative to banning or suspending users for hate speech while upholding freedom of expression. However, writing effective counterspeech is challenging for moderators/users. Hence, developing suggestion tools for writing counterspeech is the need of the hour. One critical challenge in developing such a tool is the lack of quality and diversity of the responses in the existing datasets. Hence, we introduce a new dataset - CrowdCounter containing 3,425 hate speech-counterspeech pairs spanning six different counterspeech types (empathy, humor, questioning, warning, shaming, contradiction), which is the first of its kind. The design of our annotation platform itself encourages annotators to write type-specific, non-redundant and high-quality counterspeech. We evaluate two frameworks for generating counterspeech responses - vanilla and type-controlled prompts - across four large language models. In terms of metrics, we evaluate the responses using relevance, diversity and quality. We observe that Flan-T5 is the best model in the vanilla framework across different models. Type-specific prompts enhance the relevance of the responses, although they might reduce the language quality. DialoGPT proves to be the best at following the instructions and generating the type-specific counterspeech accurately.

Learning is a key motivator behind information search behavior. With the emergence of LLM-based chatbots, students are increasingly turning to these tools as their primary resource for acquiring knowledge. However, the transition from traditional resources like textbooks and web searches raises concerns among educators. They worry that these fully-automated LLMs might lead students to delegate critical steps of search as learning. In this paper, we systematically uncover three main concerns from educators' perspectives. In response to these concerns, we conducted a mixed-methods study with 92 university students to compare three learning sources with different automation levels. Our results show that LLMs support comprehensive understanding of key concepts without promoting passive learning, though their effectiveness in knowledge retention was limited. Additionally, we found that academic performance impacted both learning outcomes and search patterns. Notably, higher-competence learners engaged more deeply with content through reading-intensive behaviors rather than relying on search activities.

Effective information retrieval (IR) from vast datasets relies on advanced techniques to extract relevant information in response to queries. Recent advancements in dense retrieval have showcased remarkable efficacy compared to traditional sparse retrieval methods. To further enhance retrieval performance, knowledge distillation techniques, often leveraging robust cross-encoder rerankers, have been extensively explored. However, existing approaches primarily distill knowledge from pointwise rerankers, which assign absolute relevance scores to documents, thus facing challenges related to inconsistent comparisons. This paper introduces Pairwise Relevance Distillation (PairDistill) to leverage pairwise reranking, offering fine-grained distinctions between similarly relevant documents to enrich the training of dense retrieval models. Our experiments demonstrate that PairDistill outperforms existing methods, achieving new state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks. This highlights the potential of PairDistill in advancing dense retrieval techniques effectively. Our source code and trained models are released at https://github.com/MiuLab/PairDistill

Conversational Question Generation (CQG) enhances the interactivity of conversational question-answering systems in fields such as education, customer service, and entertainment. However, traditional CQG, focusing primarily on the immediate context, lacks the conversational foresight necessary to guide conversations toward specified conclusions. This limitation significantly restricts their ability to achieve conclusion-oriented conversational outcomes. In this work, we redefine the CQG task as Conclusion-driven Conversational Question Generation (CCQG) by focusing on proactivity, not merely reacting to the unfolding conversation but actively steering it towards a conclusion-oriented question-answer pair. To address this, we propose a novel approach, called Proactive Conversational Question Planning with self-Refining (PCQPR). Concretely, by integrating a planning algorithm inspired by Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with the analytical capabilities of large language models (LLMs), PCQPR predicts future conversation turns and continuously refines its questioning strategies. This iterative self-refining mechanism ensures the generation of contextually relevant questions strategically devised to reach a specified outcome. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that PCQPR significantly surpasses existing CQG methods, marking a paradigm shift towards conclusion-oriented conversational question-answering systems.

The computational and memory demands of vanilla attention scale quadratically with the sequence length $N$, posing significant challenges for processing long sequences in Transformer models. FlashAttention alleviates these challenges by eliminating the $O(N^2)$ memory dependency and reducing attention latency through IO-aware memory optimizations. However, its native support for certain attention mask types is limited, and it does not inherently accommodate more complex masking requirements. Previous approaches resort to using dense masks with $O(N^2)$ memory complexity, leading to inefficiencies. In this paper, we propose FlashMask, an extension of FlashAttention that introduces a column-wise sparse representation of attention masks. This approach efficiently represents a wide range of mask types and facilitates the development of optimized kernel implementations. By adopting this novel representation, FlashMask achieves linear memory complexity $O(N)$, suitable for modeling long-context sequences. Moreover, this representation enables kernel optimizations that eliminate unnecessary computations by leveraging sparsity in the attention mask, without sacrificing computational accuracy, resulting in higher computational efficiency. We evaluate FlashMask's performance in fine-tuning and alignment training of LLMs such as SFT, LoRA, DPO, and RM. FlashMask achieves significant throughput improvements, with end-to-end speedups ranging from 1.65x to 3.22x compared to existing FlashAttention dense method. Additionally, our kernel-level comparisons demonstrate that FlashMask surpasses the latest counterpart, FlexAttention, by 12.1% to 60.7% in terms of kernel TFLOPs/s, achieving 37.8% to 62.3% of the theoretical maximum FLOPs/s on the A100 GPU. The code is open-sourced on PaddlePaddle and integrated into PaddleNLP, supporting models with over 100 billion parameters for contexts up to 128K tokens.

Generalizing language-conditioned robotic policies to new tasks remains a significant challenge, hampered by the lack of suitable simulation benchmarks. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing GemBench, a novel benchmark to assess generalization capabilities of vision-language robotic manipulation policies. GemBench incorporates seven general action primitives and four levels of generalization, spanning novel placements, rigid and articulated objects, and complex long-horizon tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art approaches on GemBench and also introduce a new method. Our approach 3D-LOTUS leverages rich 3D information for action prediction conditioned on language. While 3D-LOTUS excels in both efficiency and performance on seen tasks, it struggles with novel tasks. To address this, we present 3D-LOTUS++, a framework that integrates 3D-LOTUS's motion planning capabilities with the task planning capabilities of LLMs and the object grounding accuracy of VLMs. 3D-LOTUS++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on novel tasks of GemBench, setting a new standard for generalization in robotic manipulation. The benchmark, codes and trained models are available at \url{https://www.di.ens.fr/willow/research/gembench/}.

Model merging, such as model souping, is the practice of combining different models with the same architecture together without further training. In this work, we present a model merging methodology that addresses the difficulty of finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for target tasks in non-English languages, where task-specific data is often unavailable. We focus on mathematical reasoning and without in-language math data, facilitate cross-lingual transfer by composing language and math capabilities. We then replace the top and bottom transformer layers of the math expert directly with layers from the language expert, which consequently enhances math performance in the target language. The resulting merged models outperform the individual experts and other merging methods on the math benchmark, MGSM, by 10% across four major languages where math instruction data is scarce. In addition, this layer swapping is simple, inexpensive, and intuitive, as it is based on an interpretative analysis of the most important parameter changes during the fine-tuning of each expert. The ability to successfully re-compose LLMs for cross-lingual transfer in this manner opens up future possibilities to combine model expertise, create modular solutions, and transfer reasoning capabilities across languages all post hoc. Instruction fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is necessary to customize pre-trained models for real-world applications. This fine-tuning is especially critical in multilingual settings because most popular open-source LLMs have been pretrained on highly English-centric data (Llama et al., 2024; Yang et al., 2024a; Jiang et al., 2023). Furthermore, the scarcity of high-quality labeled data available for post-training in non-English languages and the tremendous cost of procuring it further exacerbates the inequality.