In recent years, with the rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), achieving excellent empathetic response capabilities has become a crucial prerequisite. Consequently, managing and understanding empathetic datasets have gained increasing significance. However, empathetic data are typically human-labeled, leading to insufficient datasets and wasted human labor. In this work, we present Synth-Empathy, an LLM-based data generation and quality and diversity selection pipeline that automatically generates high-quality empathetic data while discarding low-quality data. With the data generated from a low empathetic model, we are able to further improve empathetic response performance and achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) results across multiple benchmarks. Moreover, our model achieves SoTA performance on various human evaluation benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness in real-world applications. Furthermore, we show the trade-off between data quantity and quality, providing insights into empathetic data generation and selection.

In the rapidly evolving field of Large Language Models (LLMs), selecting high-quality data for fine-tuning is essential. This paper focuses on task-specific data pruning and selection to enhance fine-tuning. We introduce an innovative framework, termed P3, which improves LLM performance through a dynamic, adaptive training strategy. Specifically, P3 comprises the following components: (1) Policy-driven Difficulty Measurement: we begin by measuring the difficulty of data based on the model's real-time performance, transitioning from static, predefined metrics to more dynamic and adaptable ones. (2) Pace-adaptive Selection: we employ self-paced learning (SPL) to gradually select increasingly challenging data, thereby progressively enhancing the model's performance. (3) Diversity Promotion: we integrate Determinantal Point Process (DPP) into the selection process to promote the diversity within and between samples, enriching the learning process. We have validated our method on two well-known LLM datasets, APPS and MATH, designed for logical reasoning scenarios. The results show that our P3 framework significantly improves training outcomes compared to traditional methods. By fundamentally refining data selection and utilization strategies, P3 not only advances theoretical understanding of dynamic training approaches but also provides a versatile framework that can revolutionize model training in natural language processing.

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a significant advancement in artificial intelligence, finding applications across various domains. However, their reliance on massive internet-sourced datasets for training brings notable privacy issues, which are exacerbated in critical domains (e.g., healthcare). Moreover, certain application-specific scenarios may require fine-tuning these models on private data. This survey critically examines the privacy threats associated with LLMs, emphasizing the potential for these models to memorize and inadvertently reveal sensitive information. We explore current threats by reviewing privacy attacks on LLMs and propose comprehensive solutions for integrating privacy mechanisms throughout the entire learning pipeline. These solutions range from anonymizing training datasets to implementing differential privacy during training or inference and machine unlearning after training. Our comprehensive review of existing literature highlights ongoing challenges, available tools, and future directions for preserving privacy in LLMs. This work aims to guide the development of more secure and trustworthy AI systems by providing a thorough understanding of privacy preservation methods and their effectiveness in mitigating risks.

This study explores text-to-SQL parsing by leveraging the powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Despite recent advancements, existing LLM-based methods have not adequately addressed scalability, leading to inefficiencies when processing wide tables. Furthermore, current interaction-based approaches either lack a step-by-step, interpretable SQL generation process or fail to provide an efficient and universally applicable interaction design. To address these challenges, we introduce Interactive-T2S, a framework that generates SQL queries through direct interactions with databases. This framework includes four general tools that facilitate proactive and efficient information retrieval by the LLM. Additionally, we have developed detailed exemplars to demonstrate the step-wise reasoning processes within our framework. Our experiments on the BIRD-Dev dataset, employing a setting without oracle knowledge, reveal that our method achieves state-of-the-art results with only two exemplars, underscoring the effectiveness and robustness of our framework.

In the dynamic field of artificial intelligence (AI), the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) for text analysis are of significant academic interest. Despite the promising capabilities of various LLMs in conducting qualitative analysis, their use in the humanities and social sciences has not been thoroughly examined. This article contributes to the emerging literature on LLMs in qualitative analysis by documenting an experimental study involving GPT-4. The study focuses on performing thematic analysis (TA) using a YouTube dataset derived from an EU-funded project, which was previously analyzed by other researchers. This dataset is about the representation of Roma migrants in Sweden during 2016, a period marked by the aftermath of the 2015 refugee crisis and preceding the Swedish national elections in 2017. Our study seeks to understand the potential of combining human intelligence with AI's scalability and efficiency, examining the advantages and limitations of employing LLMs in qualitative research within the humanities and social sciences. Additionally, we discuss future directions for applying LLMs in these fields.

Learning with a limited number of labeled data is a central problem in real-world applications of machine learning, as it is often expensive to obtain annotations. To deal with the scarcity of labeled data, transfer learning is a conventional approach; it suggests to learn a transferable knowledge by training a neural network from multiple other sources. In this paper, we investigate transfer learning of tabular tasks, which has been less studied and successful in the literature, compared to other domains, e.g., vision and language. This is because tables are inherently heterogeneous, i.e., they contain different columns and feature spaces, making transfer learning difficult. On the other hand, recent advances in natural language processing suggest that the label scarcity issue can be mitigated by utilizing in-context learning capability of large language models (LLMs). Inspired by this and the fact that LLMs can also process tables within a unified language space, we ask whether LLMs can be effective for tabular transfer learning, in particular, under the scenarios where the source and target datasets are of different format. As a positive answer, we propose a novel tabular transfer learning framework, coined Prompt to Transfer (P2T), that utilizes unlabeled (or heterogeneous) source data with LLMs. Specifically, P2T identifies a column feature in a source dataset that is strongly correlated with a target task feature to create examples relevant to the target task, thus creating pseudo-demonstrations for prompts. Experimental results demonstrate that P2T outperforms previous methods on various tabular learning benchmarks, showing good promise for the important, yet underexplored tabular transfer learning problem. Code is available at https://github.com/jaehyun513/P2T.

Memorisation is a natural part of learning from real-world data: neural models pick up on atypical input-output combinations and store those training examples in their parameter space. That this happens is well-known, but how and where are questions that remain largely unanswered. Given a multi-layered neural model, where does memorisation occur in the millions of parameters? Related work reports conflicting findings: a dominant hypothesis based on image classification is that lower layers learn generalisable features and that deeper layers specialise and memorise. Work from NLP suggests this does not apply to language models, but has been mainly focused on memorisation of facts. We expand the scope of the localisation question to 12 natural language classification tasks and apply 4 memorisation localisation techniques. Our results indicate that memorisation is a gradual process rather than a localised one, establish that memorisation is task-dependent, and give nuance to the generalisation first, memorisation second hypothesis.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been found to memorize and recite some of the textual sequences from their training set verbatim, raising broad concerns about privacy and copyright issues when using LLMs. This Textual Sequence Memorization (TSM) phenomenon leads to a high demand to regulate LLM output to prevent it from generating certain memorized text to meet user requirements. However, our empirical study reveals that existing methods for TSM erasure fail to forget massive memorized samples without substantially jeopardizing the model utility. To achieve a better trade-off between the effectiveness of TSM erasure and model utility in LLMs, our paper proposes a new framework based on Entropy Maximization with Selective Optimization (EMSO), where the updated weights are chosen with a novel contrastive gradient metric without any participation of additional model or data. Our analysis shows that training with the entropy maximization loss has a more stable optimization process and better keeps model utility than existing methods. The contrastive gradient metric localizes the most influential weight for TSM erasure by taking both the gradient magnitude and direction into consideration. Extensive experiments across three model scales demonstrate that our method excels in handling large-scale forgetting requests while preserving model ability in language generation and reasoning.

Episodic structures are inherently interpretable and adaptable to evolving large-scale key events. However, state-of-the-art automatic event detection methods overlook event episodes and, therefore, struggle with these crucial characteristics. This paper introduces a novel task, episode detection, aimed at identifying episodes from a news corpus containing key event articles. An episode describes a cohesive cluster of core entities (e.g., "protesters", "police") performing actions at a specific time and location. Furthermore, an episode is a significant part of a larger group of episodes under a particular key event. Automatically detecting episodes is challenging because, unlike key events and atomic actions, we cannot rely on explicit mentions of times and locations to distinguish between episodes or use semantic similarity to merge inconsistent episode co-references. To address these challenges, we introduce EpiMine, an unsupervised episode detection framework that (1) automatically identifies the most salient, key-event-relevant terms and segments, (2) determines candidate episodes in an article based on natural episodic partitions estimated through shifts in discriminative term combinations, and (3) refines and forms final episode clusters using large language model-based reasoning on the candidate episodes. We construct three diverse, real-world event datasets annotated at the episode level. EpiMine outperforms all baselines on these datasets by an average 59.2% increase across all metrics.

While fusing the capacities and advantages of various large language models (LLMs) offers a pathway to construct more powerful and versatile models, a fundamental challenge is to properly select advantageous model during the training. Existing fusion methods primarily focus on the training mode that uses cross entropy on ground truth in a teacher-forcing setup to measure a model's advantage, which may provide limited insight towards model advantage. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that enhances the fusion process by incorporating both the training and inference modes. Our method evaluates model advantage not only through cross entropy during training but also by considering inference outputs, providing a more comprehensive assessment. To combine the two modes effectively, we introduce ProFuser to progressively transition from inference mode to training mode. To validate ProFuser's effectiveness, we fused three models, including vicuna-7b-v1.5, Llama-2-7b-chat, and mpt-7b-8k-chat, and demonstrated the improved performance in knowledge, reasoning, and safety compared to baseline methods.