Code understanding and generation have fast become some of the most popular applications of language models (LMs). Nonetheless, research on multilingual aspects of Code-LMs (i.e., LMs for code generation) such as cross-lingual transfer between different programming languages, language-specific data augmentation, and post-hoc LM adaptation, alongside exploitation of data sources other than the original textual content, has been much sparser than for their natural language counterparts. In particular, most mainstream Code-LMs have been pre-trained on source code files alone. In this work, we investigate the prospect of leveraging readily available compiler intermediate representations (IR) - shared across programming languages - to improve the multilingual capabilities of Code-LMs and facilitate cross-lingual transfer. To this end, we first compile SLTrans, a parallel dataset consisting of nearly 4M self-contained source code files coupled with respective intermediate representations. Next, starting from various base Code-LMs (ranging in size from 1.1B to 7.3B parameters), we carry out continued causal language modelling training on SLTrans, forcing the Code-LMs to (1) learn the IR language and (2) align the IR constructs with respective constructs of various programming languages. Our resulting models, dubbed IRCoder, display sizeable and consistent gains across a wide variety of code generation tasks and metrics, including prompt robustness, multilingual code completion, code understanding, and instruction following.

Recent advances in text-to-image synthesis enabled through a combination of language and vision foundation models have led to a proliferation of the tools available and an increased attention to the field. When conducting text-to-image synthesis, a central goal is to ensure that the content between text and image is aligned. As such, there exist numerous evaluation metrics that aim to mimic human judgement. However, it is often unclear which metric to use for evaluating text-to-image synthesis systems as their evaluation is highly nuanced. In this work, we provide a comprehensive overview of existing text-to-image evaluation metrics. Based on our findings, we propose a new taxonomy for categorizing these metrics. Our taxonomy is grounded in the assumption that there are two main quality criteria, namely compositionality and generality, which ideally map to human preferences. Ultimately, we derive guidelines for practitioners conducting text-to-image evaluation, discuss open challenges of evaluation mechanisms, and surface limitations of current metrics.

Recent advances in language models (LMs) have led to significant improvements in quality on complex NLP tasks, but at the expense of increased inference costs. Cascading offers a simple strategy to achieve more favorable cost-quality tradeoffs: here, a small model is invoked for most "easy" instances, while a few "hard" instances are deferred to the large model. While the principles underpinning cascading are well-studied for classification tasks - with deferral based on predicted class uncertainty favored theoretically and practically - a similar understanding is lacking for generative LM tasks. In this work, we initiate a systematic study of deferral rules for LM cascades. We begin by examining the natural extension of predicted class uncertainty to generative LM tasks, namely, the predicted sequence uncertainty. We show that this measure suffers from the length bias problem, either over- or under-emphasizing outputs based on their lengths. This is because LMs produce a sequence of uncertainty values, one for each output token; and moreover, the number of output tokens is variable across examples. To mitigate this issue, we propose to exploit the richer token-level uncertainty information implicit in generative LMs. We argue that naive predicted sequence uncertainty corresponds to a simple aggregation of these uncertainties. By contrast, we show that incorporating token-level uncertainty through learned post-hoc deferral rules can significantly outperform such simple aggregation strategies, via experiments on a range of natural language benchmarks with FLAN-T5 models. We further show that incorporating embeddings from the smaller model and intermediate layers of the larger model can give an additional boost in the overall cost-quality tradeoff.

As an alternative to expensive expert evaluation, Image Aesthetic Assessment (IAA) stands out as a crucial task in computer vision. However, traditional IAA methods are typically constrained to a single data source or task, restricting the universality and broader application. In this work, to better align with human aesthetics, we propose a Unified Multi-modal Image Aesthetic Assessment (UNIAA) framework, including a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) named UNIAA-LLaVA and a comprehensive benchmark named UNIAA-Bench. We choose MLLMs with both visual perception and language ability for IAA and establish a low-cost paradigm for transforming the existing datasets into unified and high-quality visual instruction tuning data, from which the UNIAA-LLaVA is trained. To further evaluate the IAA capability of MLLMs, we construct the UNIAA-Bench, which consists of three aesthetic levels: Perception, Description, and Assessment. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and rationality of UNIAA. UNIAA-LLaVA achieves competitive performance on all levels of UNIAA-Bench, compared with existing MLLMs. Specifically, our model performs better than GPT-4V in aesthetic perception and even approaches the junior-level human. We find MLLMs have great potential in IAA, yet there remains plenty of room for further improvement. The UNIAA-LLaVA and UNIAA-Bench will be released.

This research signifies a considerable breakthrough in leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for multi-intent spoken language understanding (SLU). Our approach re-imagines the use of entity slots in multi-intent SLU applications, making the most of the generative potential of LLMs within the SLU landscape, leading to the development of the EN-LLM series. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of Sub-Intent Instruction (SII) to amplify the analysis and interpretation of complex, multi-intent communications, which further supports the creation of the ENSI-LLM models series. Our novel datasets, identified as LM-MixATIS and LM-MixSNIPS, are synthesized from existing benchmarks. The study evidences that LLMs may match or even surpass the performance of the current best multi-intent SLU models. We also scrutinize the performance of LLMs across a spectrum of intent configurations and dataset distributions. On top of this, we present two revolutionary metrics - Entity Slot Accuracy (ESA) and Combined Semantic Accuracy (CSA) - to facilitate a detailed assessment of LLM competence in this multifaceted field." Our code and datasets are available at \url{https://github.com/SJY8460/SLM}.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have blurred the boundary of high-quality text generation between humans and machines, which is favorable for generative text steganography. While, current advanced steganographic mapping is not suitable for LLMs since most users are restricted to accessing only the black-box API or user interface of the LLMs, thereby lacking access to the training vocabulary and its sampling probabilities. In this paper, we explore a black-box generative text steganographic method based on the user interfaces of large language models, which is called LLM-Stega. The main goal of LLM-Stega is that the secure covert communication between Alice (sender) and Bob (receiver) is conducted by using the user interfaces of LLMs. Specifically, We first construct a keyword set and design a new encrypted steganographic mapping to embed secret messages. Furthermore, to guarantee accurate extraction of secret messages and rich semantics of generated stego texts, an optimization mechanism based on reject sampling is proposed. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed LLM-Stega outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.

We analyze knowledge-based visual question answering, for which given a question, the models need to ground it into the visual modality and retrieve the relevant knowledge from a given large knowledge base (KB) to be able to answer. Our analysis has two folds, one based on designing neural architectures and training them from scratch, and another based on large pre-trained language models (LLMs). Our research questions are: 1) Can we effectively augment models by explicit supervised retrieval of the relevant KB information to solve the KB-VQA problem? 2) How do task-specific and LLM-based models perform in the integration of visual and external knowledge, and multi-hop reasoning over both sources of information? 3) Is the implicit knowledge of LLMs sufficient for KB-VQA and to what extent it can replace the explicit KB? Our results demonstrate the positive impact of empowering task-specific and LLM models with supervised external and visual knowledge retrieval models. Our findings show that though LLMs are stronger in 1-hop reasoning, they suffer in 2-hop reasoning in comparison with our fine-tuned NN model even if the relevant information from both modalities is available to the model. Moreover, we observed that LLM models outperform the NN model for KB-related questions which confirms the effectiveness of implicit knowledge in LLMs however, they do not alleviate the need for external KB.

Previous works of negation understanding mainly focus on negation cue detection and scope resolution, without identifying negation subject which is also significant to the downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a new negation triplet extraction (NTE) task which aims to extract negation subject along with negation cue and scope. To achieve NTE, we devise a novel Syntax&Semantic-Enhanced Negation Extraction model, namely SSENE, which is built based on a generative pretrained language model (PLM) of Encoder-Decoder architecture with a multi-task learning framework. Specifically, the given sentence's syntactic dependency tree is incorporated into the PLM's encoder to discover the correlations between the negation subject, cue and scope. Moreover, the semantic consistency between the sentence and the extracted triplet is ensured by an auxiliary task learning. Furthermore, we have constructed a high-quality Chinese dataset NegComment based on the users' reviews from the real-world platform of Meituan, upon which our evaluations show that SSENE achieves the best NTE performance compared to the baselines. Our ablation and case studies also demonstrate that incorporating the syntactic information helps the PLM's recognize the distant dependency between the subject and cue, and the auxiliary task learning is helpful to extract the negation triplets with more semantic consistency. We further demonstrate that SSENE is also competitive on the traditional CDSR task.

Several previous studies have considered language- and domain-specific large language models (LLMs) as separate topics. This study explores the combination of a non-English language and a high-demand industry domain, focusing on a Japanese business-specific LLM. This type of a model requires expertise in the business domain, strong language skills, and regular updates of its knowledge. We trained a 13-billion-parameter LLM from scratch using a new dataset of business texts and patents, and continually pretrained it with the latest business documents. Further we propose a new benchmark for Japanese business domain question answering (QA) and evaluate our models on it. The results show that our pretrained model improves QA accuracy without losing general knowledge, and that continual pretraining enhances adaptation to new information. Our pretrained model and business domain benchmark are publicly available.

As the rapidly advancing domain of natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for interpreting human commands and generating text across various tasks. Nonetheless, the resilience of LLMs to handle text containing inherent errors, stemming from human interactions and collaborative systems, has not been thoroughly explored. Our study investigates the resilience of LLMs against five common types of disruptions including 1) ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) errors, 2) OCR (Optical Character Recognition) errors, 3) grammatical mistakes, 4) typographical errors, and 5) distractive content. We aim to investigate how these models react by deliberately embedding these errors into instructions. Our findings reveal that while some LLMs show a degree of resistance to certain types of noise, their overall performance significantly suffers. This emphasizes the importance of further investigation into enhancing model resilience. In response to the observed decline in performance, our study also evaluates a "re-pass" strategy, designed to purify the instructions of noise before the LLMs process them. Our analysis indicates that correcting noisy instructions, particularly for open-source LLMs, presents significant challenges.