Time series forecasting holds significant importance in many real-world dynamic systems and has been extensively studied. Unlike natural language process (NLP) and computer vision (CV), where a single large model can tackle multiple tasks, models for time series forecasting are often specialized, necessitating distinct designs for different tasks and applications. While pre-trained foundation models have made impressive strides in NLP and CV, their development in time series domains has been constrained by data sparsity. Recent studies have revealed that large language models (LLMs) possess robust pattern recognition and reasoning abilities over complex sequences of tokens. However, the challenge remains in effectively aligning the modalities of time series data and natural language to leverage these capabilities. We begin by reprogramming the input time series with text prototypes before feeding it into the frozen LLM to align the two modalities. To augment the LLM's ability to reason with time series data, we propose Prompt-as-Prefix (PaP), which enriches the input context and directs the transformation of reprogrammed input patches. The transformed time series patches from the LLM are finally projected to obtain the forecasts. Time series forecasting is a critical capability across many real-world dynamic systems (Jin et al., 2023a), with applications ranging from demand planning (Leonard, 2001) and inventory optimization (Li et al., 2022) to energy load forecasting (Liu et al., 2023a) and climate modeling (Schneider & Dickinson, 1974). Each time series forecasting task typically requires extensive domain expertise and task-specific model designs. This stands in stark contrast to foundation language models like GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020), GPT-4 (OpenAI, 2023), Llama (Touvron et al., 2023), inter alia, which can perform well on a diverse range of NLP tasks in a few-shot or even zero-shot setting. Pre-trained foundation models, such as large language models (LLMs), have driven rapid progress in computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP).

The generation of lyrics tightly connected to accompanying melodies involves establishing a mapping between musical notes and syllables of lyrics. This process requires a deep understanding of music constraints and semantic patterns at syllable-level, word-level, and sentence-level semantic meanings. However, pre-trained language models specifically designed at the syllable level are publicly unavailable. To solve these challenging issues, we propose to exploit fine-tuning character-level language models for syllable-level lyrics generation from symbolic melody. In particular, our method endeavors to incorporate linguistic knowledge of the language model into the beam search process of a syllable-level Transformer generator network. Additionally, by exploring ChatGPT-based evaluation for generated lyrics, along with human subjective evaluation, we demonstrate that our approach enhances the coherence and correctness of the generated lyrics, eliminating the need to train expensive new language models.

With the advent of larger and more complex deep learning models, such as in Natural Language Processing (NLP), model qualities like explainability and interpretability, albeit highly desirable, are becoming harder challenges to tackle and solve. For example, state-of-the-art models in text classification are black-box by design. Although standard explanation methods provide some degree of explainability, these are mostly correlation-based methods and do not provide much insight into the model. The alternative of causal explainability is more desirable to achieve but extremely challenging in NLP due to a variety of reasons. Inspired by recent endeavors to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) as experts, in this work, we aim to leverage the instruction-following and textual understanding capabilities of recent state-of-the-art LLMs to facilitate causal explainability via counterfactual explanation generation for black-box text classifiers. To do this, we propose a three-step pipeline via which, we use an off-the-shelf LLM to: (1) identify the latent or unobserved features in the input text, (2) identify the input features associated with the latent features, and finally (3) use the identified input features to generate a counterfactual explanation. We experiment with our pipeline on multiple NLP text classification datasets, with several recent LLMs, and present interesting and promising findings.

Hallucinations and off-target translation remain unsolved problems in MT, especially for low-resource languages and massively multilingual models. In this paper, we introduce two related methods to mitigate these failure cases with a modified decoding objective, without either requiring retraining or external models. In source-contrastive decoding, we search for a translation that is probable given the correct input, but improbable given a random input segment. In language-contrastive decoding, we search for a translation that is probable, but improbable given the wrong language indicator token. Experiments on the massively multilingual models M2M-100 (418M) and SMaLL-100 show that these methods suppress hallucinations and off-target translations, reducing the number of translations with segment-level chrF2 below 10 by 67-83% on average, and the number of translations with oscillatory hallucinations by 75-92% on average, across 57 tested translation directions. In a proof of concept on out-of-English translation, we also show that we can suppress off-target translations with large language models. We release our source code at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/ContraDecode.

In-context learning, i.e., learning from context examples, is an impressive ability of Transformer. Training Transformers to possess this in-context learning skill is computationally intensive due to the occurrence of learning plateaus, which are periods within the training process where there is minimal or no enhancement in the model's in-context learning capability. To study the mechanism behind the learning plateaus, we conceptually seperate a component within the model's internal representation that is exclusively affected by the model's weights. We call this the "weights component", and the remainder is identified as the "context component". By conducting meticulous and controlled experiments on synthetic tasks, we note that the persistence of learning plateaus correlates with compromised functionality of the weights component. Recognizing the impaired performance of the weights component as a fundamental behavior drives learning plateaus, we have developed three strategies to expedite the learning of Transformers. The effectiveness of these strategies is further confirmed in natural language processing tasks. In conclusion, our research demonstrates the feasibility of cultivating a powerful in-context learning ability within AI systems in an eco-friendly manner.

This paper unveils CG-Eval, the first-ever comprehensive and automated evaluation framework designed for assessing the generative capabilities of large Chinese language models across a spectrum of academic disciplines. CG-Eval stands out for its automated process, which critically assesses models based on their proficiency in generating precise and contextually relevant responses to a diverse array of questions within six key domains: Science and Engineering, Humanities and Social Sciences, Mathematical Calculations, Medical Practitioner Qualification Examination, Judicial Examination, and Certified Public Accountant Examination. Alongside this, we introduce Gscore, an innovative composite index developed from a weighted sum of multiple metrics. Gscore uniquely automates the quality measurement of a model's text generation against reference standards, providing a detailed and nuanced assessment of model performance. This automation not only enhances the efficiency and scalability of the evaluation process but also ensures objective and consistent assessment across various models. The detailed test data and results, highlighting the robust capabilities and comparative performance of the evaluated models, are accessible at http://cgeval.besteasy.com/.

Pre-training robot policies with a rich set of skills can substantially accelerate the learning of downstream tasks. Prior works have defined pre-training tasks via natural language instructions, but doing so requires tedious human annotation of hundreds of thousands of instructions. Thus, we propose SPRINT, a scalable offline policy pre-training approach which substantially reduces the human effort needed for pre-training a diverse set of skills. Our method uses two core ideas to automatically expand a base set of pre-training tasks: instruction relabeling via large language models and cross-trajectory skill chaining through offline reinforcement learning. As a result, SPRINT pre-training equips robots with a much richer repertoire of skills. Experimental results in a household simulator and on a real robot kitchen manipulation task show that SPRINT leads to substantially faster learning of new long-horizon tasks than previous pre-training approaches. Website at https://clvrai.com/sprint.

$\textbf{Objectives}$: Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Med-PaLM have excelled in various medical question-answering tasks. However, these English-centric models encounter challenges in non-English clinical settings, primarily due to limited clinical knowledge in respective languages, a consequence of imbalanced training corpora. We systematically evaluate LLMs in the Chinese medical context and develop a novel in-context learning framework to enhance their performance. $\textbf{Materials and Methods}$: The latest China National Medical Licensing Examination (CNMLE-2022) served as the benchmark. We collected 53 medical books and 381,149 medical questions to construct the medical knowledge base and question bank. The proposed Knowledge and Few-shot Enhancement In-context Learning (KFE) framework leverages the in-context learning ability of LLMs to integrate diverse external clinical knowledge sources. We evaluated KFE with ChatGPT(GPT3.5), GPT4, Baichuan2(BC2)-7B, and BC2-13B in CNMLE-2022 and investigated the effectiveness of different pathways for incorporating LLMs with medical knowledge from 7 perspectives. $\textbf{Results}$: Directly applying ChatGPT failed to qualify for the CNMLE-2022 at a score of 51. Cooperated with the KFE, the LLMs with varying sizes yielded consistent and significant improvements. The ChatGPT's performance surged to 70.04 and GPT-4 achieved the highest score of 82.59. This surpasses the qualification threshold (60) and exceeds the average human score of 68.70. It also enabled a smaller BC2-13B to pass the examination, showcasing the great potential in low-resource settings. $\textbf{Conclusion}$: By synergizing medical knowledge through in-context learning, LLM can extend clinical insight beyond language barriers, significantly reducing language-related disparities of LLM applications and ensuring global benefit in healthcare.

Multi-task learning of deformable object manipulation is a challenging problem in robot manipulation. Most previous works address this problem in a goal-conditioned way and adapt goal images to specify different tasks, which limits the multi-task learning performance and can not generalize to new tasks. Thus, we adapt language instruction to specify deformable object manipulation tasks and propose a learning framework. We first design a unified Transformer-based architecture to understand multi-modal data and output picking and placing action. Besides, we have introduced the visible connectivity graph to tackle nonlinear dynamics and complex configuration of the deformable object. Both simulated and real experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method is effective and can generalize to unseen instructions and tasks. Compared with the state-of-the-art method, our method achieves higher success rates (87.2% on average) and has a 75.6% shorter inference time. We also demonstrate that our method performs well in real-world experiments.

Fox News host Steve Hilton delves into ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence program that could have major implications for writing-focused jobs on'The Next Revolution.' Restoring your memories of a vague childhood toy, movie, video game or book that's been on the tip of your tongue for years could be as simple as plugging a couple of sentences into a chatbot, some users say. "I just used ChatGPT to find a long-time show I used to watch as a kid," one commenter enthused on the r/ChatGPT subreddit. "And suffice to say, nothing I typed up on Google yielded any close results. But GPT got it on the first attempt from the little memory fragments I could piece up."