Large language models have limited context capacity, hindering reasoning over long conversations. We propose the Hierarchical Aggregate Tree memory structure to recursively aggregate relevant dialogue context through conditional tree traversals. HAT encapsulates information from children nodes, enabling broad coverage with depth control. We formulate finding best context as optimal tree traversal. Experiments show HAT improves dialog coherence and summary quality over baseline contexts, demonstrating the techniques effectiveness for multi turn reasoning without exponential parameter growth. This memory augmentation enables more consistent, grounded longform conversations from LLMs

Large vision-language models (VLMs) are shown to learn rich joint image-text representations enabling high performances in relevant downstream tasks. However, they fail to showcase their quantitative understanding of objects, and they lack good counting-aware representation. This paper conducts a reproducibility study of 'Teaching CLIP to Count to Ten' (Paiss et al., 2023), which presents a method to finetune a CLIP model (Radford et al., 2021) to improve zero-shot counting accuracy in an image while maintaining the performance for zero-shot classification by introducing a counting-contrastive loss term. We improve the model's performance on a smaller subset of their training data with lower computational resources. We verify these claims by reproducing their study with our own code. The implementation can be found at https://github.com/SforAiDl/CountCLIP.

Social and behavioral determinants of health (SBDH) play a crucial role in health outcomes and are frequently documented in clinical text. Automatically extracting SBDH information from clinical text relies on publicly available good-quality datasets. However, existing SBDH datasets exhibit substantial limitations in their availability and coverage. In this study, we introduce Synth-SBDH, a novel synthetic dataset with detailed SBDH annotations, encompassing status, temporal information, and rationale across 15 SBDH categories. We showcase the utility of Synth-SBDH on three tasks using real-world clinical datasets from two distinct hospital settings, highlighting its versatility, generalizability, and distillation capabilities. Models trained on Synth-SBDH consistently outperform counterparts with no Synth-SBDH training, achieving up to 62.5% macro-F improvements. Additionally, Synth-SBDH proves effective for rare SBDH categories and under-resource constraints. Human evaluation demonstrates a Human-LLM alignment of 71.06% and uncovers areas for future refinements.

Legal tasks and datasets are often used as benchmarks for the capabilities of language models. However, openly available annotated datasets are rare. In this paper, we introduce AGB-DE, a corpus of 3,764 clauses from German consumer contracts that have been annotated and legally assessed by legal experts. Together with the data, we present a first baseline for the task of detecting potentially void clauses, comparing the performance of an SVM baseline with three fine-tuned open language models and the performance of GPT-3.5. Our results show the challenging nature of the task, with no approach exceeding an F1-score of 0.54. While the fine-tuned models often performed better with regard to precision, GPT-3.5 outperformed the other approaches with regard to recall. An analysis of the errors indicates that one of the main challenges could be the correct interpretation of complex clauses, rather than the decision boundaries of what is permissible and what is not.

In recent years, the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, especially the emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, has presented significant prospects for application in the field of education. LLMs possess the capability to interpret knowledge, answer questions, and consider context, thus providing support for dialogic teaching to students. Therefore, an examination of the capacity of LLMs to effectively fulfill instructional roles, thereby facilitating student learning akin to human educators within dialogic teaching scenarios, is an exceptionally valuable research topic. This research recruited 34 undergraduate students as participants, who were randomly divided into two groups. The experimental group engaged in dialogic teaching using ChatGPT, while the control group interacted with human teachers. Both groups learned the histogram equalization unit in the information-related course "Digital Image Processing". The research findings show comparable scores between the two groups on the retention test. However, students who engaged in dialogue with ChatGPT exhibited lower performance on the transfer test. Electroencephalography data revealed that students who interacted with ChatGPT exhibited higher levels of cognitive activity, suggesting that ChatGPT could help students establish a knowledge foundation and stimulate cognitive activity. However, its strengths on promoting students. knowledge application and creativity were insignificant. Based upon the research findings, it is evident that ChatGPT cannot fully excel in fulfilling teaching tasks in the dialogue teaching in information related courses. Combining ChatGPT with traditional human teachers might be a more ideal approach. The synergistic use of both can provide students with more comprehensive learning support, thus contributing to enhancing the quality of teaching.

Product attribute value extraction involves identifying the specific values associated with various attributes from a product profile. While existing methods often prioritize the development of effective models to improve extraction performance, there has been limited emphasis on extraction efficiency. However, in real-world scenarios, products are typically associated with multiple attributes, necessitating multiple extractions to obtain all corresponding values. In this work, we propose an Efficient product Attribute Value Extraction (EAVE) approach via lightweight sparse-layer interaction. Specifically, we employ a heavy encoder to separately encode the product context and attribute. The resulting non-interacting heavy representations of the context can be cached and reused for all attributes. Additionally, we introduce a light encoder to jointly encode the context and the attribute, facilitating lightweight interactions between them. To enrich the interaction within the lightweight encoder, we design a sparse-layer interaction module to fuse the non-interacting heavy representation into the lightweight encoder. Comprehensive evaluation on two benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves significant efficiency gains with neutral or marginal loss in performance when the context is long and number of attributes is large. Our code is available \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EAVE-EA18}{here}.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become ubiquitous in NLP and deep learning. In-Context Learning (ICL) has been suggested as a bridging paradigm between the training-free and fine-tuning LLMs settings. In ICL, an LLM is conditioned to solve tasks by means of a few solved demonstration examples included as prompt. Argument Mining (AM) aims to extract the complex argumentative structure of a text, and Argument Type Classification (ATC) is an essential sub-task of AM. We introduce an ICL strategy for ATC combining kNN-based examples selection and majority vote ensembling. In the training-free ICL setting, we show that GPT-4 is able to leverage relevant information from only a few demonstration examples and achieve very competitive classification accuracy on ATC. We further set up a fine-tuning strategy incorporating well-crafted structural features given directly in textual form. In this setting, GPT-3.5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on ATC. Overall, these results emphasize the emergent ability of LLMs to grasp global discursive flow in raw text in both off-the-shelf and fine-tuned setups.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of zero-shot compression techniques on large language models (LLMs) under long-context. We identify the tendency for computational errors to increase under long-context when employing certain compression methods. We propose a hypothesis to explain the varied behavior of different LLM compression techniques and explore remedies to mitigate the performance decline observed in some techniques under long-context. This is a course report for COS 598D Machine Learning and Systems by Prof. Kai Li at Princeton University. Due to limited computational resources, our experiments were conducted only on LLaMA-2-7B-32K.

This paper undertakes an empirical study to revisit the latest advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs): Video Assistant. This study, namely FreeVA, aims to extend existing image-based MLLM to the video domain in a training-free manner. The study provides an essential, yet must-know baseline, and reveals several surprising findings: 1) FreeVA, leveraging only offline image-based MLLM without additional training, excels in zero-shot video question-answering (e.g., MSVD-QA, ActivityNet-QA, and MSRVTT-QA), even surpassing state-of-the-art methods that involve video instruction tuning. 2) While mainstream video-based MLLMs typically initialize with an image-based MLLM (e.g., LLaVA) and then fine-tune using video instruction tuning, the study indicates that utilizing the widely adopted VideoInstruct-100K for video instruction tuning doesn't actually lead to better performance compared to not training at all. 3) The commonly used evaluation metrics in existing works are significantly influenced by changes in the GPT API version over time. If ignored, this could affect the fairness and uniformity of comparisons between different methods and impact the analysis and judgment of researchers in the field. The advancement of MLLMs is currently thriving, drawing numerous researchers into the field. We aim for this work to serve as a plug-and-play, simple yet effective baseline, encouraging the direct evaluation of existing MLLMs in video domain while also standardizing the field of video conversational models to a certain extent. Also, we encourage researchers to reconsider: Have current video MLLM methods truly acquired knowledge beyond image MLLM? Code is available at https://github.com/whwu95/FreeVA

Many existing end-to-end systems for hybrid question answering tasks can often be boiled down to a "prompt-and-pray" paradigm, where the user has limited control and insight into the intermediate reasoning steps used to achieve the final result. Additionally, due to the context size limitation of many transformer-based LLMs, it is often not reasonable to expect that the full structured and unstructured context will fit into a given prompt in a zero-shot setting, let alone a few-shot setting. We introduce BlendSQL, a superset of SQLite to act as a unified dialect for orchestrating reasoning across both unstructured and structured data. For hybrid question answering tasks involving multi-hop reasoning, we encode the full decomposed reasoning roadmap into a single interpretable BlendSQL query. Notably, we show that BlendSQL can scale to massive datasets and improve the performance of end-to-end systems while using 35% fewer tokens. Our code is available and installable as a package at https://github.com/parkervg/blendsql.