In second language learning, scenario-based conversation practice is important for language learners to achieve fluency in speaking, but students often lack sufficient opportunities to practice their conversational skills with qualified instructors or native speakers. To bridge this gap, we propose situational dialogue models for students to engage in conversational practice. Our situational dialogue models are fine-tuned on large language models (LLMs), with the aim of combining the engaging nature of an open-ended conversation with the focused practice of scenario-based tasks. Leveraging the generalization capabilities of LLMs, we demonstrate that our situational dialogue models perform effectively not only on training topics but also on topics not encountered during training. This offers a promising solution to support a wide range of conversational topics without extensive manual work. Additionally, research in the field of dialogue systems still lacks reliable automatic evaluation metrics, leading to human evaluation as the gold standard (Smith et al., 2022), which is typically expensive. To address the limitations of existing evaluation methods, we present a novel automatic evaluation method that employs fine-tuned LLMs to efficiently and effectively assess the performance of situational dialogue models.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has opened up exciting possibilities for simulating human behavior and cognitive processes, with potential applications in various domains, including marketing research and consumer behavior analysis. However, the validity of utilizing LLMs as stand-ins for human subjects remains uncertain due to glaring divergences that suggest fundamentally different underlying processes at play and the sensitivity of LLM responses to prompt variations. This paper presents a novel approach based on Shapley values from cooperative game theory to interpret LLM behavior and quantify the relative contribution of each prompt component to the model's output. Through two applications--a discrete choice experiment and an investigation of cognitive biases--we demonstrate how the Shapley value method can uncover what we term "token noise" effects, a phenomenon where LLM decisions are disproportionately influenced by tokens providing minimal informative content. This phenomenon raises concerns about the robustness and generalizability of insights obtained from LLMs in the context of human behavior simulation. Our model-agnostic approach extends its utility to proprietary LLMs, providing a valuable tool for marketers and researchers to strategically optimize prompts and mitigate apparent cognitive biases. Our findings underscore the need for a more nuanced understanding of the factors driving LLM responses before relying on them as substitutes for human subjects in research settings. We emphasize the importance of researchers reporting results conditioned on specific prompt templates and exercising caution when drawing parallels between human behavior and LLMs.

We consider the problem of aligning a large language model (LLM) to model the preferences of a human population. Modeling the beliefs, preferences, and behaviors of a specific population can be useful for a variety of different applications, such as conducting simulated focus groups for new products, conducting virtual surveys, and testing behavioral interventions, especially for interventions that are expensive, impractical, or unethical. Existing work has had mixed success using LLMs to accurately model human behavior in different contexts. We benchmark and evaluate two well-known fine-tuning approaches and evaluate the resulting populations on their ability to match the preferences of real human respondents on a survey of preferences for battery electric vehicles (BEVs). We evaluate our models against their ability to match population-wide statistics as well as their ability to match individual responses, and we investigate the role of temperature in controlling the trade-offs between these two. Additionally, we propose and evaluate a novel loss term to improve model performance on responses that require a numeric response.

The capacity and effectiveness of pre-trained multilingual models (MLMs) for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is well established. However, phenomena of positive or negative transfer, and the effect of language choice still need to be fully understood, especially in the complex setting of massively multilingual LMs. We propose an efficient method to study transfer language influence in zero-shot performance on another target language. Unlike previous work, our approach disentangles downstream tasks from language, using dedicated adapter units. Our findings suggest that some languages do not largely affect others, while some languages, especially ones unseen during pre-training, can be extremely beneficial or detrimental for different target languages. We find that no transfer language is beneficial for all target languages. We do, curiously, observe languages previously unseen by MLMs consistently benefit from Figure 1: Our approach uses efficient few-step continued transfer from almost any language. We additionally tuning (left) and adapter modules (right) to disentangle use our modular approach to quantify the effect of task and language to quantify the effect negative interference efficiently and catagorize of a transfer language for a given task and model.

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) enables them to convey factual knowledge in a more human-like fashion. Extensive efforts have been made to reduce factual hallucinations by modifying LLMs with factuality decoding. However, they also pose risks of hindering knowledge updates, as they make models overly confident in known facts. In this work, we first revisite the current factuality decoding methods and verified their effectiveness in enhancing factual accuracy. Subsequently, we conduct further evaluation of several strong factuality decoding methods on the knowledge editing benchmark. All these decoding methods significantly diminish the performance of llama2 models compared to their original decoding, with the largest decrease being a staggering 81.3\%. This further indicates that the current existing decoding methods still cannot perfectly address the factual hallucinations, as they overlook the importance of preserving the flexibility for knowledge editing. Therefore, our work suggests that research into factual alignment should simultaneously focus on the effectiveness of knowledge editing.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a revolutionary approach which has gained significant prominence in the Industry. IaC manages and provisions IT infrastructure using machine-readable code by enabling automation, consistency across the environments, reproducibility, version control, error reduction and enhancement in scalability. However, IaC orchestration is often a painstaking effort which requires specialised skills as well as a lot of manual effort. Automation of IaC is a necessity in the present conditions of the Industry and in this survey, we study the feasibility of applying Large Language Models (LLM) to address this problem. LLMs are large neural network-based models which have demonstrated significant language processing abilities and shown to be capable of following a range of instructions within a broad scope. Recently, they have also been adapted for code understanding and generation tasks successfully, which makes them a promising choice for the automatic generation of IaC configurations. In this survey, we delve into the details of IaC, usage of IaC in different platforms, their challenges, LLMs in terms of code-generation aspects and the importance of LLMs in IaC along with our own experiments. Finally, we conclude by presenting the challenges in this area and highlighting the scope for future research.

Reference resolution is an important problem, one that is essential to understand and successfully handle context of different kinds. This context includes both previous turns and context that pertains to non-conversational entities, such as entities on the user's screen or those running in the background. While LLMs have been shown to be extremely powerful for a variety of tasks, their use in reference resolution, particularly for non-conversational entities, remains underutilized. This paper demonstrates how LLMs can be used to create an extremely effective system to resolve references of various types, by showing how reference resolution can be converted into a language modeling problem, despite involving forms of entities like those on screen that are not traditionally conducive to being reduced to a text-only modality. We demonstrate large improvements over an existing system with similar functionality across different types of references, with our smallest model obtaining absolute gains of over 5% for on-screen references. We also benchmark against GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, with our smallest model achieving performance comparable to that of GPT-4, and our larger models substantially outperforming it.

In our rapidly evolving digital sphere, the ability to discern media bias becomes crucial as it can shape public sentiment and influence pivotal decisions. The advent of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, noted for their broad utility in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, invites exploration of their efficacy in media bias detection. Can ChatGPT detect media bias? This study seeks to answer this question by leveraging the Media Bias Identification Benchmark (MBIB) to assess ChatGPT's competency in distinguishing six categories of media bias, juxtaposed against fine-tuned models such as Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformers (BART), Convolutional Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (ConvBERT), and Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2). The findings present a dichotomy: ChatGPT performs at par with fine-tuned models in detecting hate speech and text-level context bias, yet faces difficulties with subtler elements of other bias detections, namely, fake news, racial, gender, and cognitive biases.

This study introduces GPTA, a Large Language Model assistance training framework, that enhances the training of downstream task models via prefix prompt. By minimizing data exposure to LLM, the framework addresses the security and legal challenges of applying LLM in downstream task model training. GPTA utilizes a new synergistic training approach, optimizing the downstream models with parameter gradients and LLMs with the novel ``dialogue gradient''. The framework not only demonstrates significant improvements in model performance across six NLP benchmark datasets, but also reduces overfitting in low-resource scenarios effectively. The detailed analyses further validate that our pioneer framework provides a cost-efficient and adaptive method for downstream task model training with LLM support.

We introduce Latxa, a family of large language models for Basque ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters. Latxa is based on Llama 2, which we continue pretraining on a new Basque corpus comprising 4.3M documents and 4.2B tokens. Addressing the scarcity of high-quality benchmarks for Basque, we further introduce 4 multiple choice evaluation datasets: EusProficiency, comprising 5,169 questions from official language proficiency exams; EusReading, comprising 352 reading comprehension questions; EusTrivia, comprising 1,715 trivia questions from 5 knowledge areas; and EusExams, comprising 16,774 questions from public examinations. In our extensive evaluation, Latxa outperforms all previous open models we compare to by a large margin. In addition, it is competitive with GPT-4 Turbo in language proficiency and understanding, despite lagging behind in reading comprehension and knowledge-intensive tasks. Both the Latxa family of models, as well as our new pretraining corpora and evaluation datasets, are publicly available under open licenses at https://github.com/hitz-zentroa/latxa. Our suite enables reproducible research on methods to build LLMs for low-resource languages.