Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable success in various reasoning tasks in the field of natural language processing. This success of LLMs has also motivated their use in graph-related tasks. Among others, recent work has explored whether LLMs can solve graph problems such as counting the number of connected components of a graph or computing the shortest path distance between two nodes. Although LLMs possess preliminary graph reasoning abilities, they might still struggle to solve some seemingly simple problems. In this paper, we investigate whether prompting via pseudo-code instructions can improve the performance of LLMs in solving graph problems. Our experiments demonstrate that using pseudo-code instructions generally improves the performance of all considered LLMs. The graphs, pseudo-code prompts, and evaluation code are publicly available.

This paper introduces AMMORE, a new dataset of 53,000 math open-response question-answer pairs from Rori, a learning platform used by students in several African countries and conducts two experiments to evaluate the use of large language models (LLM) for grading particularly challenging student answers. The AMMORE dataset enables various potential analyses and provides an important resource for researching student math acquisition in understudied, real-world, educational contexts. In experiment 1 we use a variety of LLM-driven approaches, including zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting, to grade the 1% of student answers that a rule-based classifier fails to grade accurately. We find that the best-performing approach -- chain-of-thought prompting -- accurately scored 92% of these edge cases, effectively boosting the overall accuracy of the grading from 98.7% to 99.9%. In experiment 2, we aim to better understand the consequential validity of the improved grading accuracy, by passing grades generated by the best-performing LLM-based approach to a Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) model, which estimated student mastery of specific lessons. We find that relatively modest improvements in model accuracy at the individual question level can lead to significant changes in the estimation of student mastery. Where the rules-based classifier currently used to grade student, answers misclassified the mastery status of 6.9% of students across their completed lessons, using the LLM chain-of-thought approach this misclassification rate was reduced to 2.6% of students. Taken together, these findings suggest that LLMs could be a valuable tool for grading open-response questions in K-12 mathematics education, potentially enabling encouraging wider adoption of open-ended questions in formative assessment.

In this work, we introduce EMMA-500, a large-scale multilingual language model continue-trained on texts across 546 languages designed for enhanced multilingual performance, focusing on improving language coverage for low-resource languages. To facilitate continual pre-training, we compile the MaLA corpus, a comprehensive multilingual dataset enriched with curated datasets across diverse domains. Leveraging this corpus, we conduct extensive continual pre-training of the Llama 2 7B model, resulting in EMMA-500, which demonstrates robust performance across a wide collection of benchmarks, including a comprehensive set of multilingual tasks and PolyWrite, an open-ended generation benchmark developed in this study. Our results highlight the effectiveness of continual pre-training in expanding large language models' language capacity, particularly for underrepresented languages, demonstrating significant gains in cross-lingual transfer, task generalization, and language adaptability.

Companies claim to "democratise" artificial intelligence (AI) when they donate AI open source software (OSS) to non-profit foundations or release AI models, among others, but what does this term mean and why do they do it? As the impact of AI on society and the economy grows, understanding the commercial incentives behind AI democratisation efforts is crucial for ensuring these efforts serve broader interests beyond commercial agendas. Towards this end, this study employs a mixed-methods approach to investigate commercial incentives for 43 AI OSS donations to the Linux Foundation. It makes contributions to both research and practice. It contributes a taxonomy of both individual and organisational social, economic, and technological incentives for AI democratisation. In particular, it highlights the role of democratising the governance and control rights of an OSS project (i.e., from one company to open governance) as a structural enabler for downstream goals, such as attracting external contributors, reducing development costs, and influencing industry standards, among others. Furthermore, OSS donations are often championed by individual developers within companies, highlighting the importance of the bottom-up incentives for AI democratisation. The taxonomy provides a framework and toolkit for discerning incentives for other AI democratisation efforts, such as the release of AI models. The paper concludes with a discussion of future research directions.

Despite the widespread use of statistical prior models in various fields, such models for neural network gradients have long been overlooked. The inherent challenge stems from their high-dimensional structures and complex interdependencies, which complicate effective modeling. In this work, we demonstrate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to act as gradient priors in a zero-shot setting. We examine the property by considering lossless gradient compression -- a critical application in distributed learning -- that depends heavily on precise probability modeling. To achieve this, we introduce LM-GC, a novel method that integrates LLMs with arithmetic coding. Our technique converts plain gradients into text-like formats, enhancing token efficiency by up to 38 times compared to their plain representations. We ensure that this data conversion maintains a close alignment with the structure of plain gradients and the symbols commonly recognized by LLMs. Our experiments indicate that LM-GC surpasses existing state-of-the-art lossless compression methods, improving compression rates by 10\% up to 17.2\% across various datasets and architectures. Additionally, our approach shows promising compatibility with lossy compression techniques such as quantization and sparsification. These findings highlight the significant potential of LLMs as a model for effectively handling gradients. We will release the source code upon publication.

Due to their substantial sizes, large language models (LLMs) are typically deployed within a single-backbone multi-tenant framework. In this setup, a single instance of an LLM backbone must cater to multiple users or tasks through the application of various parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) models. Despite the availability of numerous effective PEFT techniques such as LoRA, there remains a need for a PEFT approach that achieves both high efficiency during inference and competitive performance on downstream tasks. In this research, we introduce a new and straightforward PEFT methodology named Prompt DEpenDent Representation MOdification (PEDRO). The proposed method involves integrating a lightweight vector generator into each Transformer layer, which generates vectors contingent upon the input prompts. These vectors then modify the hidden representations created by the LLM through a dot product operation, thereby influencing the semantic output and generated content of the model. Extensive experimentation across a variety of tasks indicates that: (a) PEDRO surpasses recent PEFT benchmarks when using a similar number of tunable parameters.

Large language models are typically fine-tuned to align with human preferences, but tuning large models is computationally intensive and complex. In this work, we introduce $\textit{Integrated Value Guidance}$ (IVG), a method that uses implicit and explicit value functions to guide language model decoding at token and chunk-level respectively, efficiently aligning large language models purely at inference time. This approach circumvents the complexities of direct fine-tuning and outperforms traditional methods. Empirically, we demonstrate the versatility of IVG across various tasks. In controlled sentiment generation and summarization tasks, our method significantly improves the alignment of large models using inference-time guidance from $\texttt{gpt2}$-based value functions. Moreover, in a more challenging instruction-following benchmark AlpacaEval 2.0, we show that both specifically tuned and off-the-shelf value functions greatly improve the length-controlled win rates of large models against $\texttt{gpt-4-turbo}$ (e.g., $19.51\% \rightarrow 26.51\%$ for $\texttt{Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2}$ and $25.58\% \rightarrow 33.75\%$ for $\texttt{Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1}$ with Tulu guidance).

Manifestly and logically displaying the line of reasoning from evidence to answer is significant to explainable question answering (QA). The entailment tree exhibits the lines structurally, which is different from the self-explanation principle in large-scale language models. Existing methods rarely consider the semantic association of sentences between and within hierarchies within the tree structure, which is prone to apparent mistakes in combinations. In this work, we propose an architecture of integrating the Hierarchical Semantics of sentences under the framework of Controller-Generator (HiSCG) to explain answers. The HiSCG designs a hierarchical mapping between hypotheses and facts, discriminates the facts involved in tree constructions, and optimizes single-step entailments. To the best of our knowledge, We are the first to notice hierarchical semantics of sentences between the same layer and adjacent layers to yield improvements. The proposed method achieves comparable performance on all three settings of the EntailmentBank dataset. The generalization results on two out-of-domain datasets also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

News recommendation is a challenging task that involves personalization based on the interaction history and preferences of each user. Recent works have leveraged the power of pretrained language models (PLMs) to directly rank news items by using inference approaches that predominately fall into three categories: pointwise, pairwise, and listwise learning-to-rank. While pointwise methods offer linear inference complexity, they fail to capture crucial comparative information between items that is more effective for ranking tasks. Conversely, pairwise and listwise approaches excel at incorporating these comparisons but suffer from practical limitations: pairwise approaches are either computationally expensive or lack theoretical guarantees, and listwise methods often perform poorly in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for PLM-based news recommendation that integrates both pointwise relevance prediction and pairwise comparisons in a scalable manner. We present a rigorous theoretical analysis of our framework, establishing conditions under which our approach guarantees improved performance. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the MIND and Adressa news recommendation datasets.

Verbalization of robot experience, i.e., summarization of and question answering about a robot's past, is a crucial ability for improving human-robot interaction. Previous works applied rule-based systems or fine-tuned deep models to verbalize short (several-minute-long) streams of episodic data, limiting generalization and transferability. In our work, we apply large pretrained models to tackle this task with zero or few examples, and specifically focus on verbalizing life-long experiences. For this, we derive a tree-like data structure from episodic memory (EM), with lower levels representing raw perception and proprioception data, and higher levels abstracting events to natural language concepts. Given such a hierarchical representation built from the experience stream, we apply a large language model as an agent to interactively search the EM given a user's query, dynamically expanding (initially collapsed) tree nodes to find the relevant information. The approach keeps computational costs low even when scaling to months of robot experience data. We evaluate our method on simulated household robot data, human egocentric videos, and real-world robot recordings, demonstrating its flexibility and scalability.