Q-learning excels in learning from feedback within sequential decision-making tasks but often requires extensive sampling to achieve significant improvements. While reward shaping can enhance learning efficiency, non-potential-based methods introduce biases that affect performance, and potential-based reward shaping, though unbiased, lacks the ability to provide heuristics for state-action pairs, limiting its effectiveness in complex environments. Large language models (LLMs) can achieve zero-shot learning for simpler tasks, but they suffer from low inference speeds and occasional hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{LLM-guided Q-learning}, a framework that leverages LLMs as heuristics to aid in learning the Q-function for reinforcement learning. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that this approach adapts to hallucinations, improves sample efficiency, and avoids biasing final performance. Experimental results show that our algorithm is general, robust, and capable of preventing ineffective exploration.

Combining semantic information with behavioral data is a crucial research area in recommender systems. A promising approach involves leveraging external knowledge to enrich behavioral-based recommender systems with abundant semantic information. However, this approach faces two primary challenges: denoising raw external knowledge and adapting semantic representations. To address these challenges, we propose an External Knowledge-Enhanced Recommendation method with LLM Assistance (TRAWL). This method utilizes large language models (LLMs) to extract relevant recommendation knowledge from raw external data and employs a contrastive learning strategy for adapter training. Experiments on public datasets and real-world online recommender systems validate the effectiveness of our approach.

In the next few years, applications of Generative AI are expected to revolutionize a number of different areas, ranging from science & medicine to education. The potential for these seismic changes has triggered a lively debate about potential risks and resulted in calls for tighter regulation, in particular from some of the major tech companies who are leading in AI development. This regulation is likely to put at risk the budding field of open-source Generative AI. We argue for the responsible open sourcing of generative AI models in the near and medium term. To set the stage, we first introduce an AI openness taxonomy system and apply it to 40 current large language models. We then outline differential benefits and risks of open versus closed source AI and present potential risk mitigation, ranging from best practices to calls for technical and scientific contributions. We hope that this report will add a much needed missing voice to the current public discourse on near to mid-term AI safety and other societal impact.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can elicit unintended and even harmful content when misaligned with human values, posing severe risks to users and society. To mitigate these risks, current evaluation benchmarks predominantly employ expert-designed contextual scenarios to assess how well LLMs align with human values. However, the labor-intensive nature of these benchmarks limits their test scope, hindering their ability to generalize to the extensive variety of open-world use cases and identify rare but crucial long-tail risks. Additionally, these static tests fail to adapt to the rapid evolution of LLMs, making it hard to evaluate timely alignment issues. To address these challenges, we propose ALI-Agent, an evaluation framework that leverages the autonomous abilities of LLM-powered agents to conduct in-depth and adaptive alignment assessments. ALI-Agent operates through two principal stages: Emulation and Refinement. During the Emulation stage, ALI-Agent automates the generation of realistic test scenarios. In the Refinement stage, it iteratively refines the scenarios to probe long-tail risks. Specifically, ALI-Agent incorporates a memory module to guide test scenario generation, a tool-using module to reduce human labor in tasks such as evaluating feedback from target LLMs, and an action module to refine tests. Extensive experiments across three aspects of human values--stereotypes, morality, and legality--demonstrate that ALI-Agent, as a general evaluation framework, effectively identifies model misalignment. Systematic analysis also validates that the generated test scenarios represent meaningful use cases, as well as integrate enhanced measures to probe long-tail risks. Our code is available at https://github.com/SophieZheng998/ALI-Agent.git

In recent years, with the realistic generation results and a wide range of personalized applications, diffusion-based generative models gain huge attention in both visual and audio generation areas. Compared to the considerable advancements of text2image or text2audio generation, research in audio2visual or visual2audio generation has been relatively slow. The recent audio-visual generation methods usually resort to huge large language model or composable diffusion models. Instead of designing another giant model for audio-visual generation, in this paper we take a step back showing a simple and lightweight generative transformer, which is not fully investigated in multi-modal generation, can achieve excellent results on image2audio generation. The transformer operates in the discrete audio and visual Vector-Quantized GAN space, and is trained in the mask denoising manner. After training, the classifier-free guidance could be deployed off-the-shelf achieving better performance, without any extra training or modification. Since the transformer model is modality symmetrical, it could also be directly deployed for audio2image generation and co-generation. In the experiments, we show that our simple method surpasses recent image2audio generation methods. Generated audio samples could be found in this link.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have proven effective in a wide range of tasks requiring complex reasoning and linguistic comprehension. However, due to a lack of high-quality multimodal resources in languages other than English, success of MLLMs remains relatively limited to English-based settings. This poses significant challenges in developing comparable models for other languages, including even those with large speaker populations such as Arabic. To alleviate this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive family of Arabic MLLMs, dubbed \textit{Peacock}, with strong vision and language capabilities. Through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis, we demonstrate the solid performance of our models on various visual reasoning tasks and further show their emerging dialectal potential. Additionally, we introduce ~\textit{Henna}, a new benchmark specifically designed for assessing MLLMs on aspects related to Arabic culture, setting the first stone for culturally-aware Arabic MLLMs.The GitHub repository for the \textit{Peacock} project is available at \url{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/peacock}.

Recent regulatory initiatives like the European AI Act and relevant voices in the Machine Learning (ML) community stress the need to describe datasets along several key dimensions for trustworthy AI, such as the provenance processes and social concerns. However, this information is typically presented as unstructured text in accompanying documentation, hampering their automated analysis and processing. In this work, we explore using large language models (LLM) and a set of prompting strategies to automatically extract these dimensions from documents and enrich the dataset description with them. Our approach could aid data publishers and practitioners in creating machine-readable documentation to improve the discoverability of their datasets, assess their compliance with current AI regulations, and improve the overall quality of ML models trained on them. In this paper, we evaluate the approach on 12 scientific dataset papers published in two scientific journals (Nature's Scientific Data and Elsevier's Data in Brief) using two different LLMs (GPT3.5 and Flan-UL2). Results show good accuracy with our prompt extraction strategies. Concrete results vary depending on the dimensions, but overall, GPT3.5 shows slightly better accuracy (81,21%) than FLAN-UL2 (69,13%) although it is more prone to hallucinations. We have released an open-source tool implementing our approach and a replication package, including the experiments' code and results, in an open-source repository.

Controlled Text Generation (CTG) aims to produce texts that exhibit specific desired attributes. In this study, we introduce a pluggable CTG framework for Large Language Models (LLMs) named Dynamic Attribute Graphs-based controlled text generation (DATG). This framework utilizes an attribute scorer to evaluate the attributes of sentences generated by LLMs and constructs dynamic attribute graphs. DATG modulates the occurrence of key attribute words and key anti-attribute words, achieving effective attribute control without compromising the original capabilities of the model. We conduct experiments across four datasets in two tasks: toxicity mitigation and sentiment transformation, employing five LLMs as foundational models. Our findings highlight a remarkable enhancement in control accuracy, achieving a peak improvement of 19.29% over baseline methods in the most favorable task across four datasets. Additionally, we observe a significant decrease in perplexity, markedly improving text fluency.

In noisy and low-data regimes prevalent in real-world applications, a key challenge of machine learning lies in effectively incorporating inductive biases that promote data efficiency and robustness. Meta-learning and informed ML stand out as two approaches for incorporating prior knowledge into ML pipelines. While the former relies on a purely data-driven source of priors, the latter is guided by prior domain knowledge. In this paper, we formalise a hybrid paradigm, informed meta-learning, facilitating the incorporation of priors from unstructured knowledge representations, such as natural language; thus, unlocking complementarity in cross-task knowledge sharing of humans and machines. We establish the foundational components of informed meta-learning and present a concrete instantiation of this framework--the Informed Neural Process. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate the potential benefits of informed meta-learning in improving data efficiency, robustness to observational noise and task distribution shifts.

Strong student models can learn from weaker teachers: when trained on the predictions of a weaker model, a strong pretrained student can learn to correct the weak model's errors and generalize to examples where the teacher is not confident, even when these examples are excluded from training. This enables learning from cheap, incomplete, and possibly incorrect label information, such as coarse logical rules or the generations of a language model. We show that existing weak supervision theory fails to account for both of these effects, which we call pseudolabel correction and coverage expansion, respectively. We give a new bound based on expansion properties of the data distribution and student hypothesis class that directly accounts for pseudolabel correction and coverage expansion. Our bounds capture the intuition that weak-to-strong generalization occurs when the strong model is unable to fit the mistakes of the weak teacher without incurring additional error. We show that these expansion properties can be checked from finite data and give empirical evidence that they hold in practice.