In this work, we provide insight into one important limitation of large language models (LLMs), i.e. false attribution, and introduce a new hallucination metric - Simple Hallucination Index (SHI). The task of automatic author attribution for relatively small chunks of text is an important NLP task but can be challenging. We empirically evaluate the power of 3 open SotA LLMs in zero-shot setting (LLaMA-2-13B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Gemma-7B), especially as human annotation can be costly. We collected the top 10 most popular books, according to Project Gutenberg, divided each one into equal chunks of 400 words, and asked each LLM to predict the author. We then randomly sampled 162 chunks for human evaluation from each of the annotated books, based on the error margin of 7% and a confidence interval of 95% for the book with the most chunks (Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, having 922 chunks). The average results show that Mixtral 8x7B has the highest prediction accuracy, the lowest SHI, and a Pearson's correlation (r) of 0.737, 0.249, and -0.9996, respectively, followed by LLaMA-2-13B and Gemma-7B. However, Mixtral 8x7B suffers from high hallucinations for 3 books, rising as high as an SHI of 0.87 (in the range 0-1, where 1 is the worst). The strong negative correlation of accuracy and SHI, given by r, demonstrates the fidelity of the new hallucination metric, which is generalizable to other tasks. We publicly release the annotated chunks of data and our codes to aid the reproducibility and evaluation of other models.

Foundation Models (FMs) have revolutionized many areas of computing, including Automated Planning and Scheduling (APS). For example, a recent study found them useful for planning problems: plan generation, language translation, model construction, multi-agent planning, interactive planning, heuristics optimization, tool integration, and brain-inspired planning. Besides APS, there are many seemingly related tasks involving the generation of a series of actions with varying guarantees of their executability to achieve intended goals, which we collectively call planning-like (PL) tasks like business processes, programs, workflows, and guidelines, where researchers have considered using FMs. However, previous works have primarily focused on pre-trained, off-the-shelf FMs and optionally fine-tuned them. This paper discusses the need for a comprehensive FM for PL tasks from scratch and explores its design considerations. We argue that such an FM will open new and efficient avenues for PL problem-solving, just like LLMs are creating for APS.

Dental diseases have a significant impact on a considerable portion of the population, leading to various health issues that can detrimentally affect individuals' overall well-being. The integration of automated systems in oral healthcare has become increasingly crucial. Machine learning approaches offer a viable solution to address challenges such as diagnostic difficulties, inefficiencies, and errors in oral disease diagnosis. These methods prove particularly useful when physicians struggle to predict or diagnose diseases at their early stages. In this study, thirteen different machine learning, deep learning, and large language models were employed to determine the severity level of oral health issues based on radiologists' reports. The results revealed that the Few-shot learning with SBERT and Multi-Layer Perceptron model outperformed all other models across various experiments, achieving an impressive accuracy of 94.1% as the best result. Consequently, this model exhibits promise as a reliable tool for evaluating the severity of oral diseases, enabling patients to receive more effective treatment and aiding healthcare professionals in making informed decisions regarding resource allocation and the management of high-risk patients. The incidence of periodontitis and dental caries has witnessed a surge in recent years among the human population, highlighting the pressing need for early detection to prevent severe complications and tooth loss [1]. Dental caries is a significant health concern affecting both children and adults in most industrialized nations [2]. Its impact is felt throughout an individual's lifetime, leading to pain, discomfort, and oral deformities.

Flocking is a behavior where multiple agents in a system attempt to stay close to each other while avoiding collision and maintaining a desired formation. This is observed in the natural world and has applications in robotics, including natural disaster search and rescue, wild animal tracking, and perimeter surveillance and patrol. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have displayed an impressive ability to solve various collaboration tasks as individual decision-makers. Solving multi-agent flocking with LLMs would demonstrate their usefulness in situations requiring spatial and decentralized decision-making. Yet, when LLM-powered agents are tasked with implementing multi-agent flocking, they fall short of the desired behavior. After extensive testing, we find that agents with LLMs as individual decision-makers typically opt to converge on the average of their initial positions or diverge from each other. After breaking the problem down, we discover that LLMs cannot understand maintaining a shape or keeping a distance in a meaningful way. Solving multi-agent flocking with LLMs would enhance their ability to understand collaborative spatial reasoning and lay a foundation for addressing more complex multi-agent tasks. This paper discusses the challenges LLMs face in multi-agent flocking and suggests areas for future improvement and research.

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which derives reward signals directly from pairwise preference data, has shown its effectiveness on aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite its widespread use across various tasks, DPO has been criticized for its sensitivity to the SFT's effectiveness and its hindrance to the learning capacity towards human-preferred responses, leading to less satisfactory performance. To overcome those limitations, the theoretical understanding of DPO are indispensable but still lacking. To this end, we take a step towards theoretically analyzing and understanding the limitations of DPO. Specifically, we provide an analytical framework using the field theory to analyze the optimization process of DPO. By analyzing the gradient vector field of the DPO loss function, we find that the DPO loss function decreases the probability of producing human dispreferred data at a faster rate than it increases the probability of producing preferred data. This provides theoretical insights for understanding the limitations of DPO discovered in the related research experiments, thereby setting the foundation for its improvement.

This paper presents multiple question generation strategies for document-level event argument extraction. These strategies do not require human involvement and result in uncontextualized questions as well as contextualized questions grounded on the event and document of interest. Experimental results show that combining uncontextualized and contextualized questions is beneficial, especially when event triggers and arguments appear in different sentences. Our approach does not have corpus-specific components, in particular, the question generation strategies transfer across corpora. We also present a qualitative analysis of the most common errors made by our best model.

Existing Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models mainly handle translation in the general domain, while overlooking domains with special writing formulas, such as e-commerce and legal documents. Taking e-commerce as an example, the texts usually include amounts of domain-related words and have more grammar problems, which leads to inferior performances of current NMT methods. To address these problems, we collect two domain-related resources, including a set of term pairs (aligned Chinese-English bilingual terms) and a parallel corpus annotated for the e-commerce domain. Furthermore, we propose a two-step fine-tuning paradigm (named G2ST) with self-contrastive semantic enhancement to transfer one general NMT model to the specialized NMT model for e-commerce. The paradigm can be used for the NMT models based on Large language models (LLMs). Extensive evaluations on real e-commerce titles demonstrate the superior translation quality and robustness of our G2ST approach, as compared with state-of-the-art NMT models such as LLaMA, Qwen, GPT-3.5, and even GPT-4.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences through preference optimization has been crucial but labor-intensive, necessitating for each prompt a comparison of both a chosen and a rejected text completion by evaluators. Recently, Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) has demonstrated that LLMs can be aligned using merely binary "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" signals on each prompt-completion pair. In this paper, we present theoretical foundations to explain the successful alignment achieved through these binary signals. Our analysis uncovers a new perspective: optimizing a binary classifier, whose logit is a reward, implicitly induces minimizing the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) loss. In the process of this discovery, we identified two techniques for effective alignment: reward shift and underlying distribution matching. Consequently, we propose a new algorithm, \textit{Binary Classifier Optimization}, that integrates the techniques. We validate our methodology in two settings: first, on a paired preference dataset, where our method performs on par with DPO and KTO; and second, on binary signal datasets simulating real-world conditions with divergent underlying distributions between thumbs-up and thumbs-down data. Our model consistently demonstrates effective and robust alignment across two base LLMs and three different binary signal datasets, showcasing the strength of our approach to learning from binary feedback.

Multimodal event argument role labeling (EARL), a task that assigns a role for each event participant (object) in an image is a complex challenge. It requires reasoning over the entire image, the depicted event, and the interactions between various objects participating in the event. Existing models heavily rely on high-quality event-annotated training data to understand the event semantics and structures, and they fail to generalize to new event types and domains. In this paper, we propose GenEARL, a training-free generative framework that harness the power of the modern generative models to understand event task descriptions given image contexts to perform the EARL task. Specifically, GenEARL comprises two stages of generative prompting with a frozen vision-language model (VLM) and a frozen large language model (LLM). First, a generative VLM learns the semantics of the event argument roles and generates event-centric object descriptions based on the image. Subsequently, a LLM is prompted with the generated object descriptions with a predefined template for EARL (i.e., assign an object with an event argument role). We show that GenEARL outperforms the contrastive pretraining (CLIP) baseline by 9.4% and 14.2% accuracy for zero-shot EARL on the M2E2 and SwiG datasets, respectively. In addition, we outperform CLIP-Event by 22% precision on M2E2 dataset. The framework also allows flexible adaptation and generalization to unseen domains.

Current work in language models (LMs) helps us speed up or even skip thinking by accelerating and automating cognitive work. But can LMs help us with critical thinking -- thinking in deeper, more reflective ways which challenge assumptions, clarify ideas, and engineer new concepts? We treat philosophy as a case study in critical thinking, and interview 21 professional philosophers about how they engage in critical thinking and on their experiences with LMs. We find that philosophers do not find LMs to be useful because they lack a sense of selfhood (memory, beliefs, consistency) and initiative (curiosity, proactivity). We propose the selfhood-initiative model for critical thinking tools to characterize this gap. Using the model, we formulate three roles LMs could play as critical thinking tools: the Interlocutor, the Monitor, and the Respondent. We hope that our work inspires LM researchers to further develop LMs as critical thinking tools and philosophers and other 'critical thinkers' to imagine intellectually substantive uses of LMs.