Large Language Model
M3Exam: A Multilingual, Multimodal, Multilevel Benchmark for Examining Large Language Models
Despite the existence of various benchmarks for evaluating natural language processing models, we argue that human exams are a more suitable means of evaluating general intelligence for large language models (LLMs), as they inherently demand a much wider range of abilities such as language understanding, domain knowledge, and problem-solving skills. To this end, we introduce M3Exam, a novel benchmark sourced from real and official human exam questions for evaluating LLMs in a multilingual, multimodal, and multilevel context. M3Exam exhibits three unique characteristics: (1) multilingualism, encompassing questions from multiple countries that require strong multilingual proficiency and cultural knowledge; (2) multimodality, accounting for the multimodal nature of many exam questions to test the model's multimodal understanding capability; and (3) multilevel structure, featuring exams from three critical educational periods to comprehensively assess a model's proficiency at different levels. In total, M3Exam contains 12,317 questions in 9 diverse languages with three educational levels, where about 23\% of the questions require processing images for successful solving. We assess the performance of top-performing LLMs on M3Exam and find that current models, including GPT-4, still struggle with multilingual text, particularly in low-resource and non-Latin script languages. Multimodal LLMs also perform poorly with complex multimodal questions. We believe that M3Exam can be a valuable resource for comprehensively evaluating LLMs by examining their multilingual and multimodal abilities and tracking their development.
Shape Registration in the Time of Transformers
In this paper, we propose a transformer-based procedure for the efficient registration of non-rigid 3D point clouds. The proposed approach is data-driven and adopts for the first time the transformers architecture in the registration task. Our method is general and applies to different settings. Given a fixed template with some desired properties (e.g.
DDCoT: Duty-Distinct Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Multimodal Reasoning in Language Models
A long-standing goal of AI systems is to perform complex multimodal reasoning like humans. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in such multi-step reasoning on the language modality solely by leveraging the chain of thought (CoT) to mimic human thinking. However, the transfer of these advancements to multimodal contexts introduces heightened challenges, including but not limited to the impractical need for labor-intensive annotation and the limitations in terms of flexibility, generalizability, and explainability. To evoke CoT reasoning in multimodality, this work first conducts an in-depth analysis of these challenges posed by multimodality and presents two key insights: "keeping critical thinking" and "letting everyone do their jobs" in multimodal CoT reasoning. Furthermore, this study proposes a novel DDCoT prompting that maintains a critical attitude through negative-space prompting and incorporates multimodality into reasoning by first dividing the reasoning responsibility of LLMs into reasoning and recognition and then integrating the visual recognition capability of visual models into the joint reasoning process. The rationales generated by DDCoT not only improve the reasoning abilities of both large and small language models in zero-shot prompting and fine-tuning learning, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods but also exhibit impressive generalizability and explainability.
SheetCopilot: Bringing Software Productivity to the Next Level through Large Language Models
Computer end users have spent billions of hours completing daily tasks like tabular data processing and project timeline scheduling. Most of these tasks are repetitive and error-prone, yet most end users lack the skill to automate these burdensome works. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), directing software with natural language user requests become a reachable goal. In this work, we propose a SheetCopilot agent that takes natural language task and control spreadsheet to fulfill the requirements. We propose a set of atomic actions as an abstraction of spreadsheet software functionalities.
Foundation Posteriors for Approximate Probabilistic Inference
Probabilistic programs provide an expressive representation language for generative models. Given a probabilistic program, we are interested in the task of posterior inference: estimating a latent variable given a set of observed variables. Existing techniques for inference in probabilistic programs often require choosing many hyper-parameters, are computationally expensive, and/or only work for restricted classes of programs. Here we formulate inference as masked language modeling: given a program, we generate a supervised dataset of variables and assignments, and randomly mask a subset of the assignments. We then train a neural network to unmask the random values, defining an approximate posterior distribution. By optimizing a single neural network across a range of programs we amortize the cost of training, yielding a foundation posterior able to do zero-shot inference for new programs. The foundation posterior can also be fine-tuned for a particular program and dataset by optimizing a variational inference objective. We show the efficacy of the approach, zero-shot and fine-tuned, on a benchmark of STAN programs.
QuIP: 2-Bit Quantization of Large Language Models With Guarantees
We introduce quantization with incoherence processing (QuIP), a new method based on the insight that quantization benefits from incoherent weight and Hessian matrices, i.e., from the weights being even in magnitude and the directions in which it is important to round them accurately being unaligned with the coordinate axes. QuIP consists of two steps: (1) an adaptive rounding procedure minimizing a quadratic proxy objective; (2) efficient pre-and post-processing that ensures weight and Hessian incoherence via multiplication by random orthogonal matrices. We complement QuIP with the first theoretical analysis for an LLM-scale quantization algorithm, and show that our theory also applies to an existing method, OPTQ. Empirically, we find that our incoherence preprocessing improves several existing quantization algorithms and yields the first LLM quantization methods that produce viable results using only two bits per weight.
Language Quantized AutoEncoders: Towards Unsupervised Text-Image Alignment
Recent progress in scaling up large language models has shown impressive capabilities in performing few-shot learning across a wide range of natural language tasks. However, a key limitation is that these language models fundamentally lack grounding to visual perception - a crucial attribute needed to extend to real world tasks such as in visual-question answering and robotics. While prior works have largely connected image to text through pretraining or fine-tuning, learning such alignments are generally costly due to a combination of curating massive datasets and large computational burdens. In order to resolve these limitations, we propose a simple yet effective approach called Language-Quantized AutoEncoder (LQAE), a modification of VQ-VAE that learns to align text-image data in an unsupervised manner by leveraging pretrained language model denoisers (e.g., BERT). Our main idea is to encode images as sequences of text tokens by directly quantizing image embeddings using a pretrained language codebook. We then feed a masked version of the quantized embeddings into a BERT to reconstruct the original input. By doing so, LQAE learns to represent similar images with similar clusters of text tokens, thereby aligning these two modalities without the use of aligned text-image pairs. We show LQAE learns text-aligned image tokens that enable few-shot multi-modal learning with large language models, outperforming baseline methods in tasks such as image classification and VQA while requiring as few as 1-10 image-text pairs.
Efficient Equivariant Transfer Learning from Pretrained Models
Efficient transfer learning algorithms are key to the success of foundation models on diverse downstream tasks even with limited data. Recent works of Basu et al. (2023) and Kaba et al. (2022) propose group averaging (equitune) and optimization-based methods, respectively, over features from group-transformed inputs to obtain equivariant outputs from non-equivariant neural networks. While Kaba et al. (2022) are only concerned with training from scratch, we find that equitune performs poorly on equivariant zero-shot tasks despite good finetuning results. We hypothesize that this is because pretrained models provide better quality features for certain transformations than others and simply averaging them is deleterious. Hence, we propose λ-equitune that averages the features using importance weights, λs. These weights are learned directly from the data using a small neural network, leading to excellent zero-shot and finetuned results that outperform equitune. Further, we prove that λ-equitune is equivariant and a universal approximator of equivariant functions. Additionally, we show that the method of Kaba et al. (2022) used with appropriate loss functions, which we call equizero, also gives excellent zero-shot and finetuned performance.
Constrained GPI for Zero-Shot Transfer in Reinforcement Learning
For zero-shot transfer in reinforcement learning where the reward function varies between different tasks, the successor features framework has been one of the popular approaches. However, in this framework, the transfer to new target tasks with generalized policy improvement (GPI) relies on only the source successor features [5] or additional successor features obtained from the function approximators' generalization to novel inputs [11]. The goal of this work is to improve the transfer by more tightly bounding the value approximation errors of successor features on the new target tasks. Given a set of source tasks with their successor features, we present lower and upper bounds on the optimal values for novel task vectors that are expressible as linear combinations of source task vectors. Based on the bounds, we propose constrained GPI as a simple test-time approach that can improve transfer by constraining action-value approximation errors on new target tasks. Through experiments in the Scavenger and Reacher environment with state observations as well as the DeepMind Lab environment with visual observations, we show that the proposed constrained GPI significantly outperforms the prior GPI's transfer performance.
Learning Knowledge Graph-based World Models of Textual Environments
World models improve a learning agent's ability to efficiently operate in interactive and situated environments. This work focuses on the task of building world models of text-based game environments. Text-based games, or interactive narratives, are reinforcement learning environments in which agents perceive and interact with the world using textual natural language. These environments contain long, multi-step puzzles or quests woven through a world that is filled with hundreds of characters, locations, and objects. Our world model learns to simultaneously: (1) predict changes in the world caused by an agent's actions when representing the world as a knowledge graph; and (2) generate the set of contextually relevant natural language actions required to operate in the world. We frame this task as a Set of Sequences generation problem by exploiting the inherent structure of knowledge graphs and actions and introduce both a transformer-based multi-task architecture and a loss function to train it. A zero-shot ablation study on never-before-seen textual worlds shows that our methodology significantly outperforms existing textual world modeling techniques as well as the importance of each of our contributions.