Large Language Model
Blar-SQL: Faster, Stronger, Smaller NL2SQL
Domínguez, José Manuel, Errázuriz, Benjamín, Daher, Patricio
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained considerable notoriety in the field of natural language to SQL tasks (NL2SQL). In this study, we show how task decomposition can greatly benefit LLMs in database understanding and query generation in order to answer human questions with an SQL query. We fined-tuned open source models, specifically Llama-2 and Code Llama, by combining 2 different models each designated to focus on one of two tasks in order to leverage each model's core competency to further increase the accuracy of the final SQL query. We propose a new framework to divide the schema into chunks in order to fit more information into a limited context. Our results are comparable with those obtained by GPT-4 at the same time being 135 times smaller, 90 times faster and more than 100 times cheaper than GPT-4.
Advanced Unstructured Data Processing for ESG Reports: A Methodology for Structured Transformation and Enhanced Analysis
Peng, Jiahui, Gao, Jing, Tong, Xin, Guo, Jing, Yang, Hang, Qi, Jianchuan, Li, Ruiqiao, Li, Nan, Xu, Ming
In the evolving field of corporate sustainability, analyzing unstructured Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports is a complex challenge due to their varied formats and intricate content. This study introduces an innovative methodology utilizing the "Unstructured Core Library", specifically tailored to address these challenges by transforming ESG reports into structured, analyzable formats. Our approach significantly advances the existing research by offering high-precision text cleaning, adept identification and extraction of text from images, and standardization of tables within these reports. Emphasizing its capability to handle diverse data types, including text, images, and tables, the method adeptly manages the nuances of differing page layouts and report styles across industries. This research marks a substantial contribution to the fields of industrial ecology and corporate sustainability assessment, paving the way for the application of advanced NLP technologies and large language models in the analysis of corporate governance and sustainability. Our code is available at https://github.com/linancn/TianGong-AI-Unstructure.git.
Large Language Models for Social Networks: Applications, Challenges, and Solutions
Zeng, Jingying, Huang, Richard, Malik, Waleed, Yin, Langxuan, Babic, Bojan, Shacham, Danny, Yan, Xiao, Yang, Jaewon, He, Qi
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming the way people generate, explore, and engage with content. We study how we can develop LLM applications for online social networks. Despite LLMs' successes in other domains, it is challenging to develop LLM-based products for social networks for numerous reasons, and it has been relatively under-reported in the research community. We categorize LLM applications for social networks into three categories. First is knowledge tasks where users want to find new knowledge and information, such as search and question-answering. Second is entertainment tasks where users want to consume interesting content, such as getting entertaining notification content. Third is foundational tasks that need to be done to moderate and operate the social networks, such as content annotation and LLM monitoring. For each task, we share the challenges we found, solutions we developed, and lessons we learned. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive paper about developing LLM applications for social networks.
Memory, Consciousness and Large Language Model
With the development in cognitive science and Large Language Models (LLMs), increasing connections have come to light between these two distinct fields. Building upon these connections, we propose a conjecture suggesting the existence of a duality between LLMs and Tulving's theory of memory. We identify a potential correspondence between Tulving's synergistic ecphory model (SEM) of retrieval and the emergent abilities observed in LLMs, serving as supporting evidence for our conjecture. Furthermore, we speculate that consciousness may be considered a form of emergent ability based on this duality. We also discuss how other theories of consciousness intersect with our research.
Data-Centric Foundation Models in Computational Healthcare: A Survey
Zhang, Yunkun, Gao, Jin, Tan, Zheling, Zhou, Lingfeng, Ding, Kexin, Zhou, Mu, Zhang, Shaoting, Wang, Dequan
In computational healthcare [3, 72], FMs can handle a variety of clinical data with their appealing capabilities in logical reasoning and semantic understanding. Examples span fields in medical conversation [241, 316], patient health profiling [48], and treatment planning [192]. Moreover, given the strength in largescale data processing, FMs offer a shifting paradigm to assess real-world clinical data in the healthcare workflow rapidly and effectively [208, 261]. FM research places a sharp focus on the data-centric perspective [318]. First, FMs demonstrate the power of scale, where the enlarged model and data size permit FMs to capture vast amounts of information, thus increasing the pressing need of training data quantity [272]. Second, FMs encourage homogenization [21] as evidenced by their extensive adaptability to downstream tasks. High-quality data for FM training thus becomes critical since it can impact the performance of both pre-trained FM and downstream models. Therefore, addressing key data challenges is progressively recognized as a research priority.
ODIN: A Single Model for 2D and 3D Perception
Jain, Ayush, Katara, Pushkal, Gkanatsios, Nikolaos, Harley, Adam W., Sarch, Gabriel, Aggarwal, Kriti, Chaudhary, Vishrav, Fragkiadaki, Katerina
State-of-the-art models on contemporary 3D perception benchmarks like ScanNet consume and label dataset-provided 3D point clouds, obtained through post processing of sensed multiview RGB-D images. They are typically trained in-domain, forego large-scale 2D pre-training and outperform alternatives that featurize the posed RGB-D multiview images instead. The gap in performance between methods that consume posed images versus post-processed 3D point clouds has fueled the belief that 2D and 3D perception require distinct model architectures. In this paper, we challenge this view and propose ODIN (Omni-Dimensional INstance segmentation), a model that can segment and label both 2D RGB images and 3D point clouds, using a transformer architecture that alternates between 2D within-view and 3D cross-view information fusion. Our model differentiates 2D and 3D feature operations through the positional encodings of the tokens involved, which capture pixel coordinates for 2D patch tokens and 3D coordinates for 3D feature tokens. ODIN achieves state-of-the-art performance on ScanNet200, Matterport3D and AI2THOR 3D instance segmentation benchmarks, and competitive performance on ScanNet, S3DIS and COCO. It outperforms all previous works by a wide margin when the sensed 3D point cloud is used in place of the point cloud sampled from 3D mesh. When used as the 3D perception engine in an instructable embodied agent architecture, it sets a new state-of-the-art on the TEACh action-from-dialogue benchmark. Our code and checkpoints can be found at the project website: https://odin-seg.github.io.
LLaMA Pro: Progressive LLaMA with Block Expansion
Wu, Chengyue, Gan, Yukang, Ge, Yixiao, Lu, Zeyu, Wang, Jiahao, Feng, Ye, Luo, Ping, Shan, Ying
Humans generally acquire new skills without compromising the old; however, the opposite holds for Large Language Models (LLMs), e.g., from LLaMA to CodeLLaMA. To this end, we propose a new post-pretraining method for LLMs with an expansion of Transformer blocks. We tune the expanded blocks using only new corpus, efficiently and effectively improving the model's knowledge without catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we experiment on the corpus of code and math, yielding LLaMA Pro-8.3B, a versatile foundation model initialized from LLaMA2-7B, excelling in general tasks, programming, and mathematics. LLaMA Pro and its instruction-following counterpart (LLaMA Pro-Instruct) achieve advanced performance among various benchmarks, demonstrating superiority over existing open models in the LLaMA family and the immense potential of reasoning and addressing diverse tasks as an intelligent agent. Our findings provide valuable insights into integrating natural and programming languages, laying a solid foundation for developing advanced language agents that operate effectively in various environments.
LLM Augmented LLMs: Expanding Capabilities through Composition
Bansal, Rachit, Samanta, Bidisha, Dalmia, Siddharth, Gupta, Nitish, Vashishth, Shikhar, Ganapathy, Sriram, Bapna, Abhishek, Jain, Prateek, Talukdar, Partha
Foundational models with billions of parameters which have been trained on large corpora of data have demonstrated non-trivial skills in a variety of domains. However, due to their monolithic structure, it is challenging and expensive to augment them or impart new skills. On the other hand, due to their adaptation abilities, several new instances of these models are being trained towards new domains and tasks. In this work, we study the problem of efficient and practical composition of existing foundation models with more specific models to enable newer capabilities. To this end, we propose CALM -- Composition to Augment Language Models -- which introduces cross-attention between models to compose their representations and enable new capabilities. Salient features of CALM are: (i) Scales up LLMs on new tasks by 're-using' existing LLMs along with a few additional parameters and data, (ii) Existing model weights are kept intact, and hence preserves existing capabilities, and (iii) Applies to diverse domains and settings. We illustrate that augmenting PaLM2-S with a smaller model trained on low-resource languages results in an absolute improvement of up to 13\% on tasks like translation into English and arithmetic reasoning for low-resource languages. Similarly, when PaLM2-S is augmented with a code-specific model, we see a relative improvement of 40\% over the base model for code generation and explanation tasks -- on-par with fully fine-tuned counterparts.
TinyLlama: An Open-Source Small Language Model
Zhang, Peiyuan, Zeng, Guangtao, Wang, Tianduo, Lu, Wei
Building on the architecture and tokenizer of Llama 2 (Touvron et al., 2023b), TinyLlama leverages various advances contributed by the open-source community (e.g., FlashAttention (Dao, 2023)), achieving better computational efficiency. Despite its relatively small size, TinyLlama demonstrates remarkable performance in a series of downstream tasks. It significantly outperforms existing open-source language models with comparable sizes.
SPEER: Sentence-Level Planning of Long Clinical Summaries via Embedded Entity Retrieval
Adams, Griffin, Zucker, Jason, Elhadad, Noémie
Clinician must write a lengthy summary each time a patient is discharged from the hospital. This task is time-consuming due to the sheer number of unique clinical concepts covered in the admission. Identifying and covering salient entities is vital for the summary to be clinically useful. We fine-tune open-source LLMs (Mistral-7B-Instruct and Zephyr-7B-\b{eta}) on the task and find that they generate incomplete and unfaithful summaries. To increase entity coverage, we train a smaller, encoder-only model to predict salient entities, which are treated as content-plans to guide the LLM. To encourage the LLM to focus on specific mentions in the source notes, we propose SPEER: Sentence-level Planning via Embedded Entity Retrieval. Specifically, we mark each salient entity span with special "{{ }}" boundary tags and instruct the LLM to retrieve marked spans before generating each sentence. Sentence-level planning acts as a form of state tracking in that the model is explicitly recording the entities it uses. We fine-tune Mistral and Zephyr variants on a large-scale, diverse dataset of ~167k in-patient hospital admissions and evaluate on 3 datasets. SPEER shows gains in both coverage and faithfulness metrics over non-guided and guided baselines.