Recognizing visual entities in a natural language sentence and arranging them in a 2D spatial layout require a compositional understanding of language and space. This task of layout prediction is valuable in text-to-image synthesis as it allows localized and controlled in-painting of the image. In this comparative study it is shown that we can predict layouts from language representations that implicitly or explicitly encode sentence syntax, if the sentences mention similar entity-relationships to the ones seen during training. To test compositional understanding, we collect a test set of grammatically correct sentences and layouts describing compositions of entities and relations that unlikely have been seen during training. Performance on this test set substantially drops, showing that current models rely on correlations in the training data and have difficulties in understanding the structure of the input sentences. We propose a novel structural loss function that better enforces the syntactic structure of the input sentence and show large performance gains in the task of 2D spatial layout prediction conditioned on text. The loss has the potential to be used in other generation tasks where a tree-like structure underlies the conditioning modality. Code, trained models and the USCOCO evaluation set will be made available via github.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) dominate tasks like natural language processing and computer vision, harnessing their power for spatial-temporal forecasting remains challenging. The disparity between sequential text and complex spatial-temporal data hinders this application. To address this issue, this paper introduces STG-LLM, an innovative approach empowering LLMs for spatial-temporal forecasting. We tackle the data mismatch by proposing: 1) STG-Tokenizer: This spatial-temporal graph tokenizer transforms intricate graph data into concise tokens capturing both spatial and temporal relationships; 2) STG-Adapter: This minimalistic adapter, consisting of linear encoding and decoding layers, bridges the gap between tokenized data and LLM comprehension. By fine-tuning only a small set of parameters, it can effectively grasp the semantics of tokens generated by STG-Tokenizer, while preserving the original natural language understanding capabilities of LLMs. Extensive experiments on diverse spatial-temporal benchmark datasets show that STG-LLM successfully unlocks LLM potential for spatial-temporal forecasting. Remarkably, our approach achieves competitive performance on par with dedicated SOTA methods.

Despite the impressive performance across numerous tasks, large language models (LLMs) often fail in solving simple decision-making tasks due to the misalignment of the knowledge in LLMs with environments. On the contrary, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn policies from scratch, which makes them always align with environments but difficult to incorporate prior knowledge for efficient explorations. To narrow the gap, we propose TWOSOME, a novel general online framework that deploys LLMs as decision-making agents to efficiently interact and align with embodied environments via RL without requiring any prepared datasets or prior knowledge of the environments. Firstly, we query the joint probabilities of each valid action with LLMs to form behavior policies. Then, to enhance the stability and robustness of the policies, we propose two normalization methods and summarize four prompt design principles. Finally, we design a novel parameter-efficient training architecture where the actor and critic share one frozen LLM equipped with low-rank adapters (LoRA) updated by PPO. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate TWOSOME. i) TWOSOME exhibits significantly better sample efficiency and performance compared to the conventional RL method, PPO, and prompt tuning method, SayCan, in both classical decision-making environment, Overcooked, and simulated household environment, VirtualHome. ii) Benefiting from LLMs' open-vocabulary feature, TWOSOME shows superior generalization ability to unseen tasks. iii) Under our framework, there is no significant loss of the LLMs' original ability during online PPO finetuning.

Six-bit quantization (FP6) can effectively reduce the size of large language models (LLMs) and preserve the model quality consistently across varied applications. However, existing systems do not provide Tensor Core support for FP6 quantization and struggle to achieve practical performance improvements during LLM inference. It is challenging to support FP6 quantization on GPUs due to (1) unfriendly memory access of model weights with irregular bit-width and (2) high runtime overhead of weight de-quantization. To address these problems, we propose TC-FPx, the first full-stack GPU kernel design scheme with unified Tensor Core support of float-point weights for various quantization bit-width. We integrate TC-FPx kernel into an existing inference system, providing new end-to-end support (called FP6-LLM) for quantized LLM inference, where better trade-offs between inference cost and model quality are achieved. Experiments show that FP6-LLM enables the inference of LLaMA-70b using only a single GPU, achieving 1.69x-2.65x higher normalized inference throughput than the FP16 baseline. The source code will be publicly available soon.

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and LlaMA are advancing rapidly in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), but their immense size poses significant challenges, such as huge training and inference costs, substantial energy demands, and limitations for on-site deployment. Traditional compression methods such as pruning, distillation, and low-rank approximation focus on reducing the effective number of neurons in the network, while quantization focuses on reducing the numerical precision of individual weights to reduce the model size while keeping the number of neurons fixed. While these compression methods have been relatively successful in practice, there's no compelling reason to believe that truncating the number of neurons is an optimal strategy. In this context, this paper introduces CompactifAI, an innovative LLM compression approach using quantum-inspired Tensor Networks that focuses on the model's correlation space instead, allowing for a more controlled, refined and interpretable model compression. Our method is versatile and can be implemented with - or on top of - other compression techniques. As a benchmark, we demonstrate that CompactifAI alone enables compression of the LlaMA-2 7B model to only $30\%$ of its original size while recovering over $90\%$ of the original accuracy after a brief distributed retraining.

This paper introduces Ta'keed, an explainable Arabic automatic fact-checking system. While existing research often focuses on classifying claims as "True" or "False," there is a limited exploration of generating explanations for claim credibility, particularly in Arabic. Ta'keed addresses this gap by assessing claim truthfulness based on retrieved snippets, utilizing two main components: information retrieval and LLM-based claim verification. We compiled the ArFactEx, a testing gold-labelled dataset with manually justified references, to evaluate the system. The initial model achieved a promising F1 score of 0.72 in the classification task. Meanwhile, the system's generated explanations are compared with gold-standard explanations syntactically and semantically. The study recommends evaluating using semantic similarities, resulting in an average cosine similarity score of 0.76. Additionally, we explored the impact of varying snippet quantities on claim classification accuracy, revealing a potential correlation, with the model using the top seven hits outperforming others with an F1 score of 0.77.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown prominent performance in various downstream tasks in which prompt engineering plays a pivotal role in optimizing LLMs' performance. This paper, not as an overview of current prompt engineering methods, aims to highlight the limitation of designing prompts while holding an anthropomorphic assumption that expects LLMs to think like humans. From our review of 35 representative studies, we demonstrate that a goal-oriented prompt formulation, which guides LLMs to follow established human logical thinking, significantly improves the performance of LLMs. Furthermore, We introduce a novel taxonomy that categorizes goal-oriented prompting methods into five interconnected stages and we demonstrate the broad applicability of our framework by summarizing ten applicable tasks. With four future directions proposed, we hope to further emphasize and promote goal-oriented prompt engineering.

Retrieval-augmented language models (RaLM) have demonstrated the potential to solve knowledge-intensive natural language processing (NLP) tasks by combining a non-parametric knowledge base with a parametric language model. Among various RaLM approaches, iterative RaLM delivers a better generation quality due to a more frequent interaction between the retriever and the language model. Despite the benefits, iterative RaLM usually encounters high overheads due to the frequent retrieval step. To this end, we propose RaLMSpec, a speculation-inspired framework that provides generic speed-up over iterative RaLM while preserving the same model outputs through speculative retrieval and batched verification. By further incorporating prefetching, optimal speculation stride scheduler, and asynchronous verification, RaLMSpec can automatically exploit the acceleration potential to the fullest. For naive iterative RaLM serving, extensive evaluations over three language models on four downstream QA datasets demonstrate that RaLM-Spec can achieve a speed-up ratio of 1.75-2.39 For KNN-LM serving, RaLMSpec can achieve a speed-up ratio up to 7.59 and 2.45 when the retriever is an exact dense retriever and approximate dense retriever, respectively, compared with the baseline. Recent advancements in large language models such as LLaMA-2, GPT-3, and PaLM have shown promising results in diverse NLP tasks (Touvron et al., 2023; Brown et al., 2020; Chowdhery et al., 2022). However, encoding a massive amount of knowledge into a fully parametric model requires excessive effort in both training and deployment. The situation can be further exacerbated when the foundation model is required to adapt to new data or various downstream tasks (Asai et al., 2023). To address this challenge, recent work introduces retrieval-augmented language models (RaLM), which integrate the parametric language model with a non-parametric knowledge base through retrieval augmentation (Khandelwal et al., 2019; Shi et al., 2023; Ram et al., 2023; Khattab et al., 2022).

Reasoning over Commonsense Knowledge Bases (CSKB), i.e. CSKB reasoning, has been explored as a way to acquire new commonsense knowledge based on reference knowledge in the original CSKBs and external prior knowledge. Despite the advancement of Large Language Models (LLM) and prompt engineering techniques in various reasoning tasks, they still struggle to deal with CSKB reasoning. One of the problems is that it is hard for them to acquire explicit relational constraints in CSKBs from only in-context exemplars, due to a lack of symbolic reasoning capabilities (Bengio et al., 2021). To this end, we proposed **ConstraintChecker**, a plugin over prompting techniques to provide and check explicit constraints. When considering a new knowledge instance, ConstraintChecker employs a rule-based module to produce a list of constraints, then it uses a zero-shot learning module to check whether this knowledge instance satisfies all constraints. The acquired constraint-checking result is then aggregated with the output of the main prompting technique to produce the final output. Experimental results on CSKB Reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by bringing consistent improvements over all prompting methods. Codes and data are available at \url{https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/ConstraintChecker}.

This paper introduces Investigate-Consolidate-Exploit (ICE), a novel strategy for enhancing the adaptability and flexibility of AI agents through inter-task self-evolution. Unlike existing methods focused on intra-task learning, ICE promotes the transfer of knowledge between tasks for genuine self-evolution, similar to human experience learning. The strategy dynamically investigates planning and execution trajectories, consolidates them into simplified workflows and pipelines, and exploits them for improved task execution. Our experiments on the XAgent framework demonstrate ICE's effectiveness, reducing API calls by as much as 80% and significantly decreasing the demand for the model's capability. Specifically, when combined with GPT-3.5, ICE's performance matches that of raw GPT-4 across various agent tasks. We argue that this self-evolution approach represents a paradigm shift in agent design, contributing to a more robust AI community and ecosystem, and moving a step closer to full autonomy.