Large language models (LLMs) offer powerful capabilities but incur substantial computational costs, driving the need for efficient compression techniques. This study evaluates the impact of popular compression methods - Magnitude Pruning, SparseGPT, and Wanda - on the LLaMA-2-7B model, focusing on the trade-offs between model size reduction, downstream task performance, and the role of calibration data. Our findings reveal that while SparseGPT and Wanda preserve perplexity even at 50% sparsity, they suffer significant degradation on downstream tasks, highlighting the inadequacy of perplexity as the sole evaluation metric. To address this, we introduce Jensen-Shannon (JS) Divergence as a more comprehensive metric that captures nuanced changes in model behavior post-compression. We further demonstrate that task-specific calibration data significantly enhances the downstream performance of compressed models compared to general calibration data. This research underscores the necessity for diverse evaluation metrics and careful calibration data selection to fully understand the complexities of LLM compression and its implications for practical applications.

Embodied Everyday Task is a popular task in the embodied AI community, requiring agents to make a sequence of actions based on natural language instructions and visual observations. Traditional learning-based approaches face two challenges. Firstly, natural language instructions often lack explicit task planning. Secondly, extensive training is required to equip models with knowledge of the task environment. Previous works based on Large Language Model (LLM) either suffer from poor performance due to the lack of task-specific knowledge or rely on ground truth as few-shot samples. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel approach called Progressive Retrieval Augmented Generation (P-RAG), which not only effectively leverages the powerful language processing capabilities of LLMs but also progressively accumulates task-specific knowledge without ground-truth. Compared to the conventional RAG methods, which retrieve relevant information from the database in a one-shot manner to assist generation, P-RAG introduces an iterative approach to progressively update the database. In each iteration, P-RAG retrieves the latest database and obtains historical information from the previous interaction as experiential references for the current interaction. Moreover, we also introduce a more granular retrieval scheme that not only retrieves similar tasks but also incorporates retrieval of similar situations to provide more valuable reference experiences. Extensive experiments reveal that P-RAG achieves competitive results without utilizing ground truth and can even further improve performance through self-iterations.

With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), generating rule-based data for real-world applications has become more accessible. Due to the inherent ambiguity of natural language and the complexity of rule sets, especially in long contexts, LLMs often struggle to follow all specified rules, frequently omitting at least one. To enhance the reasoning and understanding of LLMs on long and complex contexts, we propose a novel prompting strategy Multi-Lingual Prompt, namely MLPrompt, which automatically translates the error-prone rule that an LLM struggles to follow into another language, thus drawing greater attention to it. Experimental results on public datasets across various tasks have shown MLPrompt can outperform state-of-the-art prompting methods such as Chain of Thought, Tree of Thought, and Self-Consistency. Additionally, we introduce a framework integrating MLPrompt with an auto-checking mechanism for structured data generation, with a specific case study in text-to-MIP instances. Further, we extend the proposed framework for text-to-SQL to demonstrate its generation ability towards structured data synthesis.

Recent psycholinguistic research has compared human reading times to surprisal estimates from language models to study the factors shaping human sentence processing difficulty. Previous studies have shown a strong fit between surprisal values from Transformers and reading times. However, standard Transformers work with a lossless representation of the entire previous linguistic context, unlike models of human language processing that include memory decay. To bridge this gap, this paper evaluates a modification of the Transformer model that uses ALiBi (Press et al., 2022), a recency bias added to attention scores. Surprisal estimates with ALiBi show an improved fit to human reading times compared to a standard Transformer baseline. A subsequent analysis of attention heads suggests that ALiBi's mixture of slopes -- which determine the rate of memory decay in each attention head -- may play a role in the improvement by helping models with ALiBi to track different kinds of linguistic dependencies.

LLM-as-a-Judge and reward models are widely used alternatives of multiple-choice questions or human annotators for large language model (LLM) evaluation. Their efficacy shines in evaluating long-form responses, serving a critical role as evaluators of leaderboards and as proxies to align LLMs via reinforcement learning. However, despite their popularity, their effectiveness outside of English remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis on automated evaluators, reporting key findings on their behavior in a non-English environment. First, we discover that English evaluation capabilities significantly influence language-specific capabilities, often more than the language proficiency itself, enabling evaluators trained in English to easily transfer their skills to other languages. Second, we identify critical shortcomings, where LLMs fail to detect and penalize errors, such as factual inaccuracies, cultural misrepresentations, and the presence of unwanted language. Finally, we release Kudge, the first non-English meta-evaluation dataset containing 5,012 human annotations in Korean.

This study presents BanStereoSet, a dataset designed to evaluate stereotypical social biases in multilingual LLMs for the Bangla language. In an effort to extend the focus of bias research beyond English-centric datasets, we have localized the content from the StereoSet, IndiBias, and Kamruzzaman et. al.'s datasets, producing a resource tailored to capture biases prevalent within the Bangla-speaking community. Our BanStereoSet dataset consists of 1,194 sentences spanning 9 categories of bias: race, profession, gender, ageism, beauty, beauty in profession, region, caste, and religion. This dataset not only serves as a crucial tool for measuring bias in multilingual LLMs but also facilitates the exploration of stereotypical bias across different social categories, potentially guiding the development of more equitable language technologies in Bangladeshi contexts. Our analysis of several language models using this dataset indicates significant biases, reinforcing the necessity for culturally and linguistically adapted datasets to develop more equitable language technologies.

Enriching datasets with demographic information, such as gender, race, and age from names, is a critical task in fields like healthcare, public policy, and social sciences. Such demographic insights allow for more precise and effective engagement with target populations. Despite previous efforts employing hidden Markov models and recurrent neural networks to predict demographics from names, significant limitations persist: the lack of large-scale, well-curated, unbiased, publicly available datasets, and the lack of an approach robust across datasets. This scarcity has hindered the development of traditional supervised learning approaches. In this paper, we demonstrate that the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform as well as, if not better than, bespoke models trained on specialized data. We apply these LLMs to a variety of datasets, including a real-life, unlabelled dataset of licensed financial professionals in Hong Kong, and critically assess the inherent demographic biases in these models. Our work not only advances the state-of-the-art in demographic enrichment but also opens avenues for future research in mitigating biases in LLMs.

In this paper, we evaluate the creative fiction writing abilities of a fine-tuned small language model (SLM), BART Large, and compare its performance to humans and two large language models (LLMs): GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o. Our evaluation consists of two experiments: (i) a human evaluation where readers assess the stories generated by the SLM compared to human-written stories, and (ii) a qualitative linguistic analysis comparing the textual characteristics of the stories generated by the different models. In the first experiment, we asked 68 participants to rate short stories generated by the models and humans along dimensions such as grammaticality, relevance, creativity, and attractiveness. BART Large outperformed human writers in most aspects, except creativity, with an overall score of 2.11 compared to 1.85 for human-written texts -- a 14% improvement. In the second experiment, the qualitative analysis revealed that, while GPT-4o exhibited near-perfect internal and external coherence, it tended to produce more predictable narratives, with only 3% of its stories seen as novel. In contrast, 15% of BART's stories were considered novel, indicating a higher degree of creativity despite its smaller model size. This study provides both quantitative and qualitative insights into how model size and fine-tuning influence the balance between creativity, fluency, and coherence in creative writing tasks.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the principles, challenges, and methodologies associated with quantizing large-scale neural network models. As neural networks have evolved towards larger and more complex architectures to address increasingly sophisticated tasks, the computational and energy costs have escalated significantly. We explore the necessity and impact of model size growth, highlighting the performance benefits as well as the computational challenges and environmental considerations. The core focus is on model quantization as a fundamental approach to mitigate these challenges by reducing model size and improving efficiency without substantially compromising accuracy. We delve into various quantization techniques, including both post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT), and analyze several state-of-the-art algorithms such as LLM-QAT, PEQA(L4Q), ZeroQuant, SmoothQuant, and others. Through comparative analysis, we examine how these methods address issues like outliers, importance weighting, and activation quantization, ultimately contributing to more sustainable and accessible deployment of large-scale models.

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