Large Language Model
Towards Natural Language-Driven Assembly Using Foundation Models
Joglekar, Omkar, Lancewicki, Tal, Kozlovsky, Shir, Tchuiev, Vladimir, Feldman, Zohar, Di Castro, Dotan
Large Language Models (LLMs) and strong vision models have enabled rapid research and development in the field of Vision-Language-Action models that enable robotic control. The main objective of these methods is to develop a generalist policy that can control robots with various embodiments. However, in industrial robotic applications such as automated assembly and disassembly, some tasks, such as insertion, demand greater accuracy and involve intricate factors like contact engagement, friction handling, and refined motor skills. Implementing these skills using a generalist policy is challenging because these policies might integrate further sensory data, including force or torque measurements, for enhanced precision. In our method, we present a global control policy based on LLMs that can transfer the control policy to a finite set of skills that are specifically trained to perform high-precision tasks through dynamic context switching. The integration of LLMs into this framework underscores their significance in not only interpreting and processing language inputs but also in enriching the control mechanisms for diverse and intricate robotic operations.
Confidence Regulation Neurons in Language Models
Stolfo, Alessandro, Wu, Ben, Gurnee, Wes, Belinkov, Yonatan, Song, Xingyi, Sachan, Mrinmaya, Nanda, Neel
Despite their widespread use, the mechanisms by which large language models (LLMs) represent and regulate uncertainty in next-token predictions remain largely unexplored. This study investigates two critical components believed to influence this uncertainty: the recently discovered entropy neurons and a new set of components that we term token frequency neurons. Entropy neurons are characterized by an unusually high weight norm and influence the final layer normalization (LayerNorm) scale to effectively scale down the logits. Our work shows that entropy neurons operate by writing onto an unembedding null space, allowing them to impact the residual stream norm with minimal direct effect on the logits themselves. We observe the presence of entropy neurons across a range of models, up to 7 billion parameters. On the other hand, token frequency neurons, which we discover and describe here for the first time, boost or suppress each token's logit proportionally to its log frequency, thereby shifting the output distribution towards or away from the unigram distribution. Finally, we present a detailed case study where entropy neurons actively manage confidence in the setting of induction, i.e. detecting and continuing repeated subsequences.
Unlocking the Future: Exploring Look-Ahead Planning Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models
Men, Tianyi, Cao, Pengfei, Jin, Zhuoran, Chen, Yubo, Liu, Kang, Zhao, Jun
Planning, as the core module of agents, is crucial in various fields such as embodied agents, web navigation, and tool using. With the development of large language models (LLMs), some researchers treat large language models as intelligent agents to stimulate and evaluate their planning capabilities. However, the planning mechanism is still unclear. In this work, we focus on exploring the look-ahead planning mechanism in large language models from the perspectives of information flow and internal representations. First, we study how planning is done internally by analyzing the multi-layer perception (MLP) and multi-head self-attention (MHSA) components at the last token. We find that the output of MHSA in the middle layers at the last token can directly decode the decision to some extent. Based on this discovery, we further trace the source of MHSA by information flow, and we reveal that MHSA mainly extracts information from spans of the goal states and recent steps. According to information flow, we continue to study what information is encoded within it. Specifically, we explore whether future decisions have been encoded in advance in the representation of flow. We demonstrate that the middle and upper layers encode a few short-term future decisions to some extent when planning is successful. Overall, our research analyzes the look-ahead planning mechanisms of LLMs, facilitating future research on LLMs performing planning tasks.
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual NER Using Phonemic Representations for Low-Resource Languages
Sohn, Jimin, Jung, Haeji, Cheng, Alex, Kang, Jooeon, Du, Yilin, Mortensen, David R.
Existing zero-shot cross-lingual NER approaches require substantial prior knowledge of the target language, which is impractical for low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to NER using phonemic representation based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to bridge the gap between representations of different languages. Our experiments show that our method significantly outperforms baseline models in extremely low-resource languages, with the highest average F-1 score (46.38%) and lowest standard deviation (12.67), particularly demonstrating its robustness with non-Latin scripts.
Preference Tuning For Toxicity Mitigation Generalizes Across Languages
Li, Xiaochen, Yong, Zheng-Xin, Bach, Stephen H.
We investigate the mechanisms enabling crosslingual generalization of safety preference tuning. While significant resources have been allocated Recent work (Lee et al., 2024) shows that models to enhance the safety of large language models trained via DPO do not lose the ability to generate (LLMs) for deployment, safety of multilingual toxic content; instead, they learn to suppress the LLMs remains underexplored (Yong et al., 2023a; neuron activations that lead to toxicity, focusing on Deng et al., 2024). Recent work has shown that the role of key and value vectors in Multi-Layer multilingual LLMs have significant toxicity levels Perceptrons (MLP). While these findings explain and therefore highlights the need for multilingual DPO's effectiveness in the training language, they toxicity mitigation (Jain et al., 2024). However, to do not address its cross-lingual generalization. To reduce toxicity in open-ended generations in a non-bridge this gap, we extend the analysis to a multilingual English language X, current solutions (Pozzobon context, and we demonstrate that both key et al., 2024; Liu et al., 2021; Pozzobon et al., 2023; Dementieva et al., 2024) are resource-intensive as
AIC MLLM: Autonomous Interactive Correction MLLM for Robust Robotic Manipulation
Xiong, Chuyan, Shen, Chengyu, Li, Xiaoqi, Zhou, Kaichen, Liu, Jiaming, Wang, Ruiping, Dong, Hao
The ability to reflect on and correct failures is crucial for robotic systems to interact stably with real-life objects.Observing the generalization and reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), previous approaches have aimed to utilize these models to enhance robotic systems accordingly.However, these methods typically focus on high-level planning corrections using an additional MLLM, with limited utilization of failed samples to correct low-level contact poses. To address this gap, we propose an Autonomous Interactive Correction (AIC) MLLM, which makes use of previous low-level interaction experiences to correct SE(3) pose predictions. Specifically, AIC MLLM is initially fine-tuned to acquire both pose prediction and feedback prompt comprehension abilities.We carefully design two types of prompt instructions through interactions with objects: 1) visual masks to highlight unmovable parts for position correction, and 2)textual descriptions to indicate potential directions for rotation correction.During inference, a Feedback Information Extraction module is introduced to recognize the failure cause, allowing AIC MLLM to adaptively correct the pose prediction using the corresponding prompts. To further enhance manipulation stability, we devise a Test Time Adaptation strategy that enables AIC MLLM to better adapt to the current scene configuration.Finally, extensive experiments are conducted in both simulated and real-world environments to evaluate the proposed method. The results demonstrate that our AIC MLLM can efficiently correct failure samples by leveraging interaction experience prompts.Real-world demonstration can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/aic-mllm
Unveiling LLM Mechanisms Through Neural ODEs and Control Theory
This study presents a novel approach that leverages Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs) to unravel the intricate relationships between inputs and outputs in Large Language Models (LLMs), and employs robust control to fine-tune outputs to meet predefined standards. Central to our methodology is the transformation of LLM inputs and outputs into a lower-dimensional latent space, facilitating a detailed examination of the information processing pathways within LLMs. Neural ODEs play a pivotal role in this investigation by providing a dynamic model that captures the continuous evolution of data within the LLMs. Additionally, robust control mechanisms are applied to strategically adjust the model's outputs, ensuring they not only maintain high quality and reliability but also adhere to specific performance criteria. This fusion of Neural ODEs and robust control represents a significant advancement in LLM interpretability, offering a comprehensive framework that elucidates the previously opaque mechanisms of these complex models. Our empirical results validate the effectiveness of this integrated approach, making a substantial contribution to the field of explainable AI by merging advanced machine learning techniques with the critical need for transparency and control in AI outputs.
Compensate Quantization Errors: Make Weights Hierarchical to Compensate Each Other
Gao, Yifei, Ou, Jie, Wang, Lei, Xiao, Yuting, Xiang, Zhiyuan, Dai, Ruiting, Cheng, Jun
Emergent Large Language Models (LLMs) use their extraordinary performance and powerful deduction capacity to discern from traditional language models. However, the expenses of computational resources and storage for these LLMs are stunning, quantization then arises as a trending conversation. To address accuracy decay caused by quantization, two streams of works in post-training quantization methods stand out. One uses other weights to compensate existing quantization error, while the other transfers the quantization difficulty to other parts in the model. Combining both merits, we introduce Learnable Singular value Increment (LSI) as an advanced solution. LSI uses Singular Value Decomposition to extract singular values of the weights and make them learnable to help weights compensate each other conditioned on activation. Incorporating LSI with existing techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in diverse quantization settings, no matter in weight-only, weight-activation or extremely low bit scenarios. By unleashing the potential of LSI, efficient finetuning on quantized model is no longer a prohibitive problem.
Towards Scalable Exact Machine Unlearning Using Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Chowdhury, Somnath Basu Roy, Choromanski, Krzysztof, Sehanobish, Arijit, Dubey, Avinava, Chaturvedi, Snigdha
Machine unlearning is the process of efficiently removing the influence of a training data instance from a trained machine learning model without retraining it from scratch. A popular subclass of unlearning approaches is exact machine unlearning, which focuses on techniques that explicitly guarantee the removal of the influence of a data instance from a model. Exact unlearning approaches use a machine learning model in which individual components are trained on disjoint subsets of the data. During deletion, exact unlearning approaches only retrain the affected components rather than the entire model. While existing approaches reduce retraining costs, it can still be expensive for an organization to retrain a model component as it requires halting a system in production, which leads to service failure and adversely impacts customers. To address these challenges, we introduce an exact unlearning framework -- Sequence-aware Sharded Sliced Training (S3T), designed to enhance the deletion capabilities of an exact unlearning system while minimizing the impact on model's performance. At the core of S3T, we utilize a lightweight parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach that enables parameter isolation by sequentially training layers with disjoint data slices. This enables efficient unlearning by simply deactivating the layers affected by data deletion. Furthermore, to reduce the retraining cost and improve model performance, we train the model on multiple data sequences, which allows S3T to handle an increased number of deletion requests. Both theoretically and empirically, we demonstrate that S3T attains superior deletion capabilities and enhanced performance compared to baselines across a wide range of settings.
Towards Region-aware Bias Evaluation Metrics
Borah, Angana, Garimella, Aparna, Mihalcea, Rada
When exposed to human-generated data, language models are known to learn and amplify societal biases. While previous works introduced benchmarks that can be used to assess the bias in these models, they rely on assumptions that may not be universally true. For instance, a gender bias dimension commonly used by these metrics is that of family--career, but this may not be the only common bias in certain regions of the world. In this paper, we identify topical differences in gender bias across different regions and propose a region-aware bottom-up approach for bias assessment. Our proposed approach uses gender-aligned topics for a given region and identifies gender bias dimensions in the form of topic pairs that are likely to capture gender societal biases. Several of our proposed bias topic pairs are on par with human perception of gender biases in these regions in comparison to the existing ones, and we also identify new pairs that are more aligned than the existing ones. In addition, we use our region-aware bias topic pairs in a Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT)-based evaluation metric to test for gender biases across different regions in different data domains. We also find that LLMs have a higher alignment to bias pairs for highly-represented regions showing the importance of region-aware bias evaluation metric.