Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a simple and effective method for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large language models (LLMs). The basic idea of CoT is to let LLMs break down their thought processes step-by-step by putting exemplars in the input prompt. However, the densely structured prompt exemplars of CoT may cause the cognitive overload of LLMs. Inspired by human cognition, we introduce CoT-Sep, a novel method that strategically employs separators at the end of each exemplar in CoT prompting. These separators are designed to help the LLMs understand their thought processes better while reasoning. It turns out that CoT-Sep significantly improves the LLMs' performances on complex reasoning tasks (e.g., GSM-8K, AQuA, CSQA), compared with the vanilla CoT, which does not use separators. We also study the effects of the type and the location of separators tested on multiple LLMs, including GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, and LLaMA-2 7B. Interestingly, the type/location of separators should be chosen appropriately to boost the reasoning capability of CoT.

Advancing the frontier of subquadratic architectures for Language Models (LMs) is crucial in the rapidly evolving field of natural language processing. Current innovations, including State Space Models, were initially celebrated for surpassing Transformer performance on language modeling tasks. However, these models have revealed deficiencies in essential In-Context Learning capabilities - a domain where the Transformer traditionally shines. The Based model emerged as a hybrid solution, blending a Linear Transformer with a kernel inspired by the Taylor expansion of exponential functions, augmented by convolutional networks. Mirroring the Transformer's in-context adeptness, it became a strong contender in the field. In our work, we present a singular, elegant alteration to the Based kernel that amplifies its In-Context Learning abilities evaluated with the Multi-Query Associative Recall task and overall language modeling process, as demonstrated on the Pile dataset.

The upscaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has yielded impressive advances in natural language processing, yet it also poses significant deployment challenges. Weight quantization has emerged as a widely embraced solution to reduce memory and computational demands. This paper introduces BitDistiller, a framework that synergizes Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) with Knowledge Distillation (KD) to boost the performance of LLMs at ultra-low precisions (sub-4-bit). Specifically, BitDistiller first incorporates a tailored asymmetric quantization and clipping technique to maximally preserve the fidelity of quantized weights, and then proposes a novel Confidence-Aware Kullback-Leibler Divergence (CAKLD) objective, which is employed in a self-distillation manner to enable faster convergence and superior model performance. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that BitDistiller significantly surpasses existing methods in both 3-bit and 2-bit configurations on general language understanding and complex reasoning benchmarks. Notably, BitDistiller is shown to be more cost-effective, demanding fewer data and training resources. The code is available at https://github.com/DD-DuDa/BitDistiller.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has propelled dialogue generation into new realms, particularly in the field of role-playing systems (RPSs). While enhanced with ordinary role-relevant training dialogues, existing LLM-based RPSs still struggle to align with roles when handling intricate and trapped queries in boundary scenarios. In this paper, we design the Modular ORchestrated Trap-setting Interaction SystEm (MORTISE) to benchmark and improve the role-playing LLMs' performance. MORTISE can produce highly role-relevant aggressive queries through the collaborative effort of multiple LLM-based modules, and formulate corresponding responses to create an adversarial training dataset via a consistent response generator. We select 190 Chinese and English roles to construct aggressive queries to benchmark existing role-playing LLMs. Through comprehensive evaluation, we find that existing models exhibit a general deficiency in role alignment capabilities. We further select 180 of the roles to collect an adversarial training dataset (named RoleAD) and retain the other 10 roles for testing. Experiments on models improved by RoleAD indicate that our adversarial dataset ameliorates this deficiency, with the improvements demonstrating a degree of generalizability in ordinary scenarios.

Making LLMs speak for different, especially minority groups of people, and generate statements supporting their diverse or even controversial perspectives is critical to creating an inclusive environment. However, existing LLMs lack sufficient controllability to the stance of their generated content, which often contains inconsistent, neutral, or biased statements. In this paper, we improve the controllability of LLMs in generating statements supporting an argument the user defined in the prompt. We find that multi-round debates between two LLMs with opposite stances generate higher-quality and more salient statements for each, which are important training data to improve the controllability of LLMs. Motivated by this, we develop a novel debate & tuning ("DEBATunE") pipeline finetuning LLMs to generate the statements obtained via debate. To examine DEBATunE, we curate the largest dataset of debate topics so far, which covers 710 controversial topics and corresponding arguments for each topic. Evaluations by the GPT-4 judge with a novel controversy controllability metric show that LLMs' capability of expressing diverse perspectives is significantly improved by DEBATunE. Moreover, such controllability can be generalized to unseen topics, generating high-quality statements supporting controversial arguments. Our codes, models, and data will be released at https://github.com/tianyi-lab/DEBATunE.

Hallucinations pose a significant challenge for the practical implementation of large language models (LLMs). The utilization of parametric knowledge in generating factual content is constrained by the limited knowledge of LLMs, potentially resulting in internal hallucinations. While incorporating external information can help fill knowledge gaps, it also introduces the risk of irrelevant information, thereby increasing the likelihood of external hallucinations. A careful and balanced integration of the parametric knowledge within LLMs with external information is crucial to alleviate hallucinations. In this study, we present Rowen, a novel approach that enhances LLMs with a selective retrieval augmentation process tailored to address hallucinated outputs. This process is governed by a multilingual semantic-aware detection module, which evaluates the consistency of the perturbed responses across various languages for the same queries. Upon detecting inconsistencies indicative of hallucinations, Rowen activates the retrieval of external information to rectify the model outputs. Rowen adeptly harmonizes the intrinsic parameters in LLMs with external knowledge sources, effectively mitigating hallucinations by ensuring a balanced integration of internal reasoning and external evidence. Through a comprehensive empirical analysis, we demonstrate that Rowen surpasses the current state-of-the-art in both detecting and mitigating hallucinated content within the outputs of LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are aligned to moral and ethical guidelines but remain susceptible to creative prompts called Jailbreak that can bypass the alignment process. However, most jailbreaking prompts contain harmful questions in the natural language (mainly English), which can be detected by the LLM themselves. In this paper, we present jailbreaking prompts encoded using cryptographic techniques. We first present a pilot study on the state-of-the-art LLM, GPT-4, in decoding several safe sentences that have been encrypted using various cryptographic techniques and find that a straightforward word substitution cipher can be decoded most effectively. Motivated by this result, we use this encoding technique for writing jailbreaking prompts. We present a mapping of unsafe words with safe words and ask the unsafe question using these mapped words. Experimental results show an attack success rate (up to 59.42%) of our proposed jailbreaking approach on state-of-the-art proprietary models including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and Gemini-Pro. Additionally, we discuss the over-defensiveness of these models. We believe that our work will encourage further research in making these LLMs more robust while maintaining their decoding capabilities.

The entry of large language models (LLMs) into research and commercial spaces has led to a trend of ever-larger models, with initial promises of generalisability, followed by a widespread desire to downsize and create specialised models without the need for complete fine-tuning, using Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) methods. We present an investigation into the suitability of different PEFT methods to clinical decision-making tasks, across a range of model sizes, including extremely small models with as few as $25$ million parameters. Our analysis shows that the performance of most PEFT approaches varies significantly from one task to another, with the exception of LoRA, which maintains relatively high performance across all model sizes and tasks, typically approaching or matching full fine-tuned performance. The effectiveness of PEFT methods in the clinical domain is evident, particularly for specialised models which can operate on low-cost, in-house computing infrastructure. The advantages of these models, in terms of speed and reduced training costs, dramatically outweighs any performance gain from large foundation LLMs. Furthermore, we highlight how domain-specific pre-training interacts with PEFT methods and model size, and discuss how these factors interplay to provide the best efficiency-performance trade-off. Full code available at: tbd.

With the advent of large language models (LLM), the line between human-crafted and machine-generated texts has become increasingly blurred. This paper delves into the inquiry of identifying discernible and unique linguistic properties in texts that were written by humans, particularly uncovering the underlying discourse structures of texts beyond their surface structures. Introducing a novel methodology, we leverage hierarchical parse trees and recursive hypergraphs to unveil distinctive discourse patterns in texts produced by both LLMs and humans. Empirical findings demonstrate that, although both LLMs and humans generate distinct discourse patterns influenced by specific domains, human-written texts exhibit more structural variability, reflecting the nuanced nature of human writing in different domains. Notably, incorporating hierarchical discourse features enhances binary classifiers' overall performance in distinguishing between human-written and machine-generated texts, even on out-of-distribution and paraphrased samples. This underscores the significance of incorporating hierarchical discourse features in the analysis of text patterns. The code and dataset will be available at [TBA].

Leveraging users' long engagement histories is essential for personalized content recommendations. The success of pretrained language models (PLMs) in NLP has led to their use in encoding user histories and candidate items, framing content recommendations as textual semantic matching tasks. However, existing works still struggle with processing very long user historical text and insufficient user-item interaction. In this paper, we introduce a content-based recommendation framework, SPAR, which effectively tackles the challenges of holistic user interest extraction from the long user engagement history. It achieves so by leveraging PLM, poly-attention layers and attention sparsity mechanisms to encode user's history in a session-based manner. The user and item side features are sufficiently fused for engagement prediction while maintaining standalone representations for both sides, which is efficient for practical model deployment. Moreover, we enhance user profiling by exploiting large language model (LLM) to extract global interests from user engagement history. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods.