In this study, we investigate the capabilities and inherent biases of advanced large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in the context of debate evaluation. We discover that LLM's performance exceeds humans and surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art methods fine-tuned on extensive datasets in debate evaluation. We additionally explore and analyze biases present in LLMs, including positional bias, lexical bias, order bias, which may affect their evaluative judgments. Our findings reveal a consistent bias in both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 towards the second candidate response presented, attributed to prompt design. We also uncover lexical biases in both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, especially when label sets carry connotations such as numerical or sequential, highlighting the critical need for careful label verbalizer selection in prompt design. Additionally, our analysis indicates a tendency of both models to favor the debate's concluding side as the winner, suggesting an end-of-discussion bias.

Recent advancements in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning utilize complex modules but are hampered by high token consumption, limited applicability, and challenges in reproducibility. This paper conducts a critical evaluation of CoT prompting, extending beyond arithmetic to include complex logical and commonsense reasoning tasks, areas where standard CoT methods fall short. We propose the integration of human-like heuristics and shortcuts into language models (LMs) through "break the chain" strategies. These strategies disrupt traditional CoT processes using controlled variables to assess their efficacy. Additionally, we develop innovative zero-shot prompting strategies that encourage the use of shortcuts, enabling LMs to quickly exploit reasoning clues and bypass detailed procedural steps. Our comprehensive experiments across various LMs, both commercial and open-source, reveal that LMs maintain effective performance with "break the chain" strategies. We also introduce ShortcutQA, a dataset specifically designed to evaluate reasoning through shortcuts, compiled from competitive tests optimized for heuristic reasoning tasks such as forward/backward reasoning and simplification. Our analysis confirms that ShortcutQA not only poses a robust challenge to LMs but also serves as an essential benchmark for enhancing reasoning efficiency in AI.

Scientific writing is a challenging task, particularly for novice researchers who often rely on feedback from experienced peers. Recent work has primarily focused on improving surface form and style rather than manuscript content. In this paper, we propose a novel task: automated focused feedback generation for scientific writing assistance. We present SWIF$^{2}$T: a Scientific WrIting Focused Feedback Tool. It is designed to generate specific, actionable and coherent comments, which identify weaknesses in a scientific paper and/or propose revisions to it. Our approach consists of four components - planner, investigator, reviewer and controller - leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) to implement them. We compile a dataset of 300 peer reviews citing weaknesses in scientific papers and conduct human evaluation. The results demonstrate the superiority in specificity, reading comprehension, and overall helpfulness of SWIF$^{2}$T's feedback compared to other approaches. In our analysis, we also identified cases where automatically generated reviews were judged better than human ones, suggesting opportunities for integration of AI-generated feedback in scientific writing.

In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a pivotal component [45]. Their ability to understand, generate, and manipulate human language has opened up new avenues towards advanced machine intelligence. Interestingly, despite being primarily trained on next-token prediction tasks, LLMs are able to produce much more sophisticated answers when asked to generate steps of reasoning [30, 58]. This phenomenon, often referred to as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, and illustrated on Table 1, appears paradoxical: on the one hand, LLMs are not explicitly programmed to reason; on the other hand, they are capable of following logical chains of thoughts to produce relatively complex answers. Table 1: Chain-of-Thought consists in eliciting reasoning steps before answering (A) a question (Q).

Large-language Models (LLMs) have been extremely successful at tasks like complex dialogue understanding, reasoning and coding due to their emergent abilities. These emergent abilities have been extended with multi-modality to include image, audio, and video capabilities. Recommender systems, on the other hand, have been critical for information seeking and item discovery needs. Recently, there have been attempts to apply LLMs for recommendations. One difficulty of current attempts is that the underlying LLM is usually not trained on the recommender system data, which largely contains user interaction signals and is often not publicly available. Another difficulty is user interaction signals often have a different pattern from natural language text, and it is currently unclear if the LLM training setup can learn more non-trivial knowledge from interaction signals compared with traditional recommender system methods. Finally, it is difficult to train multiple LLMs for different use-cases, and to retain the original language and reasoning abilities when learning from recommender system data. To address these three limitations, we propose an Item-Language Model (ILM), which is composed of an item encoder to produce text-aligned item representations that encode user interaction signals, and a frozen LLM that can understand those item representations with preserved pretrained knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments which demonstrate both the importance of the language-alignment and of user interaction knowledge in the item encoder.

There has recently been growing interest in conversational agents with long-term memory which has led to the rapid development of language models that use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Until recently, most work on RAG has focused on information retrieval from large databases of texts, like Wikipedia, rather than information from long-form conversations. In this paper, we argue that effective retrieval from long-form conversational data faces two unique problems compared to static database retrieval: 1) time/event-based queries, which requires the model to retrieve information about previous conversations based on time or the order of a conversational event (e.g., the third conversation on Tuesday), and 2) ambiguous queries that require surrounding conversational context to understand. To better develop RAG-based agents that can deal with these challenges, we generate a new dataset of ambiguous and time-based questions that build upon a recent dataset of long-form, simulated conversations, and demonstrate that standard RAG based approaches handle such questions poorly. We then develop a novel retrieval model which combines chained-of-table search methods, standard vector-database retrieval, and a prompting method to disambiguate queries, and demonstrate that this approach substantially improves over current methods at solving these tasks. We believe that this new dataset and more advanced RAG agent can act as a key benchmark and stepping stone towards effective memory augmented conversational agents that can be used in a wide variety of AI applications.

This study intends to systematically disentangle pure logic reasoning and text understanding by investigating the contrast across abstract and contextualized logical problems from a comprehensive set of domains. We explore whether LLMs demonstrate genuine reasoning capabilities across various domains when the underlying logical structure remains constant. We focus on two main questions (1) Can abstract logical problems alone accurately benchmark an LLM's reasoning ability in real-world scenarios, disentangled from contextual support in practical settings? (2) Does fine-tuning LLMs on abstract logic problem generalize to contextualized logic problems and vice versa? To investigate these questions, we focus on standard propositional logic, specifically propositional deductive and abductive logic reasoning. In particular, we construct instantiated datasets for deductive and abductive reasoning with 4 levels of difficulty, encompassing 12 distinct categories or domains based on the categorization of Wikipedia. Our experiments aim to provide insights into disentangling context in logical reasoning and the true reasoning capabilities of LLMs and their generalization potential. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/agiresearch/ContextHub.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT demonstrate significant potential in the medical field, often evaluated using multiple-choice questions (MCQs) similar to those found on the USMLE. Despite their prevalence in medical education, MCQs have limitations that might be exacerbated when assessing LLMs. To evaluate the effectiveness of MCQs in assessing the performance of LLMs, we developed a fictional medical benchmark focused on a non-existent gland, the Glianorex. This approach allowed us to isolate the knowledge of the LLM from its test-taking abilities. We used GPT-4 to generate a comprehensive textbook on the Glianorex in both English and French and developed corresponding multiple-choice questions in both languages. We evaluated various open-source, proprietary, and domain-specific LLMs using these questions in a zero-shot setting. The models achieved average scores around 67%, with minor performance differences between larger and smaller models. Performance was slightly higher in English than in French. Fine-tuned medical models showed some improvement over their base versions in English but not in French. The uniformly high performance across models suggests that traditional MCQ-based benchmarks may not accurately measure LLMs' clinical knowledge and reasoning abilities, instead highlighting their pattern recognition skills. This study underscores the need for more robust evaluation methods to better assess the true capabilities of LLMs in medical contexts.

For entity recognition - including classification Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation and linking - and relation classification problems, Extraction (RE) allow for the extraction and categorization recent ZSL methods (Aly et al., 2021; Ledell Wu, of structured data from unstructured 2020; Chen and Li, 2021) rely on textual descriptions text, which in turn enables not only more accurate of entities or relations. Descriptions provide entity recognition and relationship extraction, but the required information about the semantics of entities also getting data from several unstructured sources, (or relations), which help the models to identify helping to build knowledge graphs and the semantic entity mentions in texts without observing them web. However, these methods usually rely on during training. Works such as (Ledell Wu, 2020; labeled data (usually human-annotated data) for a De Cao et al., 2021) and (Aly et al., 2021) show good performance, usually requiring domain experts how effective it is to use textual descriptions to perform for data acquisition and labeling, which may entity recognition tasks in the zero-shot context.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been crucial to the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs), however, it is often a complex and brittle process. In the classical RLHF framework, a reward model is first trained to represent human preferences, which is in turn used by an online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to optimize the LLM. A prominent issue with such methods is \emph{reward over-optimization} or \emph{reward hacking}, where performance as measured by the learned proxy reward model increases, but true quality plateaus or even deteriorates. Direct Alignment Algorithms (DDAs) like Direct Preference Optimization have emerged as alternatives to the classical RLHF pipeline by circumventing the reward modeling phase. However, although DAAs do not use a separate proxy reward model, they still commonly deteriorate from over-optimization. While the so-called reward hacking phenomenon is not well-defined for DAAs, we still uncover similar trends: at higher KL budgets, DAA algorithms exhibit similar degradation patterns to their classic RLHF counterparts. In particular, we find that DAA methods deteriorate not only across a wide range of KL budgets but also often before even a single epoch of the dataset is completed. Through extensive empirical experimentation, this work formulates and formalizes the reward over-optimization or hacking problem for DAAs and explores its consequences across objectives, training regimes, and model scales.