Within few-shot learning, in-context learning (ICL) has become a potential method for leveraging contextual information to improve model performance on small amounts of data or in resource-constrained environments where training models on large datasets is prohibitive. However, the quality of the selected sample in a few shots severely limits the usefulness of ICL. The primary goal of this paper is to enhance the performance of evaluation metrics for in-context learning by selecting high-quality samples in few-shot learning scenarios. We employ the chi-square test to identify high-quality samples and compare the results with those obtained using low-quality samples. Our findings demonstrate that utilizing high-quality samples leads to improved performance with respect to all evaluated metrics.

Moral judgement is a complex human reaction that engages cognitive and emotional dimensions. While some of the morality neural correlates are known, it is currently unclear if we can detect moral violation at a single-trial level. In a pilot study, here we explore the feasibility of moral judgement decoding from text stimuli with passive brain-computer interfaces. For effective moral judgement elicitation, we use video-audio affective priming prior to text stimuli presentation and attribute the text to moral agents. Our results show that further efforts are necessary to achieve reliable classification between moral congruency vs. incongruency states. We obtain good accuracy results for neutral vs. morally-charged trials. With this research, we try to pave the way towards neuroadaptive human-computer interaction and more human-compatible large language models (LLMs)

The evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a key element in their continuous improvement process and many benchmarks have been developed to assess the performance of LLMs in different tasks and topics. As LLMs become adopted worldwide, evaluating them in languages other than English is increasingly important. However, most LLM benchmarks are simply translated using an automated tool and then run in the target language. This means that the results depend not only on the LLM performance in that language but also on the quality of the translation. In this paper, we consider the case of the well-known Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. Selected categories of the benchmark are translated into Spanish using Azure Translator and ChatGPT4 and run on ChatGPT4. Next, the results are processed to identify the test items that produce different answers in Spanish and English. Those are then analyzed manually to understand if the automatic translation caused the change. The results show that a significant fraction of the failing items can be attributed to mistakes in the translation of the benchmark. These results make a strong case for improving benchmarks in languages other than English by at least revising the translations of the items and preferably by adapting the tests to the target language by experts.

Researchers have been studying approaches to steer the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) and build personalized LLMs tailored for various applications. While fine-tuning seems to be a direct solution, it requires substantial computational resources and may significantly affect the utility of the original LLM. Recent endeavors have introduced more lightweight strategies, focusing on extracting "steering vectors" to guide the model's output toward desired behaviors by adjusting activations within specific layers of the LLM's transformer architecture. However, such steering vectors are directly extracted from the activations of human preference data and thus often lead to suboptimal results and occasional failures, especially in alignment-related scenarios. This work proposes an innovative approach that could produce more effective steering vectors through bi-directional preference optimization. Our method is designed to allow steering vectors to directly influence the generation probability of contrastive human preference data pairs, thereby offering a more precise representation of the target behavior. By carefully adjusting the direction and magnitude of the steering vector, we enabled personalized control over the desired behavior across a spectrum of intensities. Extensive experimentation across various open-ended generation tasks, particularly focusing on steering AI personas, has validated the efficacy of our approach. Moreover, we comprehensively investigate critical alignment-concerning scenarios, such as managing truthfulness, mitigating hallucination, and addressing jailbreaking attacks. Remarkably, our method can still demonstrate outstanding steering effectiveness across these scenarios. Furthermore, we showcase the transferability of our steering vectors across different models/LoRAs and highlight the synergistic benefits of applying multiple vectors simultaneously.

Large language models (LLMs) excellently generate human-like text, but also raise concerns about misuse in fake news and academic dishonesty. Decoding-based watermark, particularly the GumbelMax-trick-based watermark(GM watermark), is a standout solution for safeguarding machine-generated texts due to its notable detectability. However, GM watermark encounters a major challenge with generation diversity, always yielding identical outputs for the same prompt, negatively impacting generation diversity and user experience. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new type of GM watermark, the Logits-Addition watermark, and its three variants, specifically designed to enhance diversity. Among these, the GumbelSoft watermark (a softmax variant of the Logits-Addition watermark) demonstrates superior performance in high diversity settings, with its AUROC score outperforming those of the two alternative variants by 0.1 to 0.3 and surpassing other decoding-based watermarking methods by a minimum of 0.1.

We introduce Integer Scale, a novel post-training quantization scheme for large language models that effectively resolves the inference bottleneck in current fine-grained quantization approaches while maintaining similar accuracies. Integer Scale is a free lunch as it requires no extra calibration or fine-tuning which will otherwise incur additional costs. It can be used plug-and-play for most fine-grained quantization methods. Its integration results in at most 1.85x end-to-end speed boost over the original counterpart with comparable accuracy. Additionally, due to the orchestration of the proposed Integer Scale and fine-grained quantization, we resolved the quantization difficulty for Mixtral-8x7B and LLaMA-3 models with negligible performance degradation, and it comes with an end-to-end speed boost of 2.13x, and 2.31x compared with their FP16 versions respectively.

Existing image-text modality alignment in Vision Language Models (VLMs) treats each text token equally in an autoregressive manner. Despite being simple and effective, this method results in sub-optimal cross-modal alignment by over-emphasizing the text tokens that are less correlated with or even contradictory with the input images. In this paper, we advocate for assigning distinct contributions for each text token based on its visual correlation. Specifically, we present by contrasting image inputs, the difference in prediction logits on each text token provides strong guidance of visual correlation. We therefore introduce Contrastive ALignment (CAL), a simple yet effective re-weighting strategy that prioritizes training visually correlated tokens. Our experimental results demonstrate that CAL consistently improves different types of VLMs across different resolutions and model sizes on various benchmark datasets. Importantly, our method incurs minimal additional computational overhead, rendering it highly efficient compared to alternative data scaling strategies.

Safety limitations in service robotics across various industries have raised significant concerns about the need for robust mechanisms ensuring that robots adhere to safe practices, thereby preventing actions that might harm humans or cause property damage. Despite advances, including the integration of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with Large Language Models (LLMs), challenges in ensuring consistent safety in autonomous robot actions persist. In this paper, we propose a novel integration of Large Language Models with Embodied Robotic Control Prompts (ERCPs) and Embodied Knowledge Graphs (EKGs) to enhance the safety framework for service robots. ERCPs are designed as predefined instructions that ensure LLMs generate safe and precise responses. These responses are subsequently validated by EKGs, which provide a comprehensive knowledge base ensuring that the actions of the robot are continuously aligned with safety protocols, thereby promoting safer operational practices in varied contexts. Our experimental setup involved diverse real-world tasks, where robots equipped with our framework demonstrated significantly higher compliance with safety standards compared to traditional methods. This integration fosters secure human-robot interactions and positions our methodology at the forefront of AI-driven safety innovations in service robotics.

The performance on general tasks decreases after Large Language Models (LLMs) are fine-tuned on domain-specific tasks, the phenomenon is known as Catastrophic Forgetting (CF). However, this paper presents a further challenge for real application of domain-specific LLMs beyond CF, called General Capabilities Integration (GCI), which necessitates the integration of both the general capabilities and domain knowledge within a single instance. The objective of GCI is not merely to retain previously acquired general capabilities alongside new domain knowledge, but to harmonize and utilize both sets of skills in a cohesive manner to enhance performance on domain-specific tasks. Taking legal domain as an example, we carefully design three groups of training and testing tasks without lacking practicability, and construct the corresponding datasets. To better incorporate general capabilities across domain-specific scenarios, we introduce ALoRA, which utilizes a multi-head attention module upon LoRA, facilitating direct information transfer from preceding tokens to the current one. This enhancement permits the representation to dynamically switch between domain-specific knowledge and general competencies according to the attention. Extensive experiments are conducted on the proposed tasks. The results exhibit the significance of our setting, and the effectiveness of our method.

At the core of self-supervised learning for vision is the idea of learning invariant or equivariant representations with respect to a set of data transformations. This approach, however, introduces strong inductive biases, which can render the representations fragile in downstream tasks that do not conform to these symmetries. In this work, drawing insights from world models, we propose to instead learn a general representation that can adapt to be invariant or equivariant to different transformations by paying attention to context -- a memory module that tracks task-specific states, actions, and future states. Here, the action is the transformation, while the current and future states respectively represent the input's representation before and after the transformation. Our proposed algorithm, Contextual Self-Supervised Learning (ContextSSL), learns equivariance to all transformations (as opposed to invariance). In this way, the model can learn to encode all relevant features as general representations while having the versatility to tail down to task-wise symmetries when given a few examples as the context. Empirically, we demonstrate significant performance gains over existing methods on equivariance-related tasks, supported by both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.