Recently, Instruction fine-tuning has risen to prominence as a potential method for enhancing the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on novel tasks. This technique has shown an exceptional ability to boost the performance of moderately sized LLMs, sometimes even reaching performance levels comparable to those of much larger model variants. The focus is on the robustness of instruction-tuned LLMs to seen and unseen tasks. We conducted an exploration of six models including Alpaca, Vicuna, WizardLM, and Traditional Task-oriented Models(Flan-T5-XL/XXL, T0++) using real-world relation extraction datasets as case studies. We carried out a comprehensive evaluation of these instruction-following LLMs which have been tuned based on open-domain instructions and task-oriented instructions. The main discussion is their performance and robustness towards instructions. We have observed that in most cases, the model's performance in dealing with unfamiliar instructions tends to worsen significantly, and the robustness of the model for RE instructions deteriorates compared to QA. Further, we discovered that up until a certain parameter size threshold (3B), the performance of the FLAN-T5 model improves as the parameter count increases. The robustness of different scales of FLAN-T5 models to RE instruction is worse than the robustness to QA instruction.

As large language models (LLMs) generate texts with increasing fluency and realism, there is a growing need to identify the source of texts to prevent the abuse of LLMs. Text watermarking techniques have proven reliable in distinguishing whether a text is generated by LLMs by injecting hidden patterns into the generated texts. However, we argue that existing watermarking methods for LLMs are encoding-inefficient (only contain one bit of information - whether it is generated from an LLM or not) and cannot flexibly meet the diverse information encoding needs (such as encoding model version, generation time, user id, etc.) in different LLMs application scenarios. In this work, we conduct the first systematic study on the topic of Codable Text Watermarking for LLMs (CTWL) that allows text watermarks to carry more customizable information. First of all, we study the taxonomy of LLM watermarking technology and give a mathematical formulation for CTWL. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive evaluation system for CTWL: (1) watermarking success rate, (2) robustness against various corruptions, (3) coding rate of payload information, (4) encoding and decoding efficiency, (5) impacts on the quality of the generated text. To meet the requirements of these non-Paretoimproving metrics, we devise a CTWL method named Balance-Marking, based on the motivation of ensuring that available and unavailable vocabularies for encoding information have approximately equivalent probabilities. Compared to the random vocabulary partitioning extended from the existing work, a probabilitybalanced vocabulary partition can significantly improve the quality of the generated text. Extensive experimental results have shown that our method outperforms a direct baseline under comprehensive evaluation. We hope this work can raise the community's awareness of the importance of CTWL and inspire further research on designing more efficient, practical, and robust watermarking methods for LLMs. Recently, with the explosive development of Large Language Models (LLMs) (OpenAI, 2022; Touvron et al., 2023), there has been growing concern in the community about the potential negative effects of the AI-generated content (AIGC).

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality, realistic images from textual descriptions. However, these approaches have faced challenges in precisely aligning the generated visual content with the textual concepts described in the prompts. In this paper, we propose a two-stage coarse-to-fine semantic re-alignment method, named RealignDiff, aimed at improving the alignment between text and images in text-to-image diffusion models. In the coarse semantic re-alignment phase, a novel caption reward, leveraging the BLIP-2 model, is proposed to evaluate the semantic discrepancy between the generated image caption and the given text prompt. Subsequently, the fine semantic re-alignment stage employs a local dense caption generation module and a re-weighting attention modulation module to refine the previously generated images from a local semantic view. Experimental results on the MS-COCO benchmark demonstrate that the proposed two-stage coarse-to-fine semantic re-alignment method outperforms other baseline re-alignment techniques by a substantial margin in both visual quality and semantic similarity with the input prompt.

Large language models (LLMs) can use in-context demonstrations to improve performance on zero-shot tasks. However, selecting the best in-context examples is challenging because model performance can vary widely depending on the selected examples. We present a cross-entropy difference (CED) method for selecting in-context demonstrations. Our method is based on the observation that the effectiveness of in-context demonstrations negatively correlates with the perplexity of the test example by a language model that was finetuned on that demonstration. We utilize parameter efficient finetuning to train small models on training data that are used for computing the cross-entropy difference between a test example and every candidate in-context demonstration. This metric is used to rank and select in-context demonstrations independently for each test input. We evaluate our method on a mix-domain dataset that combines 8 benchmarks, representing 4 text generation tasks, showing that CED for in-context demonstration selection can improve performance for a variety of LLMs.

Text classification tasks often encounter few shot scenarios with limited labeled data, and addressing data scarcity is crucial. Data augmentation with mixup has shown to be effective on various text classification tasks. However, most of the mixup methods do not consider the varying degree of learning difficulty in different stages of training and generate new samples with one hot labels, resulting in the model over confidence. In this paper, we propose a self evolution learning (SE) based mixup approach for data augmentation in text classification, which can generate more adaptive and model friendly pesudo samples for the model training. SE focuses on the variation of the model's learning ability. To alleviate the model confidence, we introduce a novel instance specific label smoothing approach, which linearly interpolates the model's output and one hot labels of the original samples to generate new soft for label mixing up. Through experimental analysis, in addition to improving classification accuracy, we demonstrate that SE also enhances the model's generalize ability.

As a way of communicating with users and any LLMs like GPT or PaLM2, prompting becomes an increasingly important research topic for better utilization of LLMs. Although simple prompting has great performance on single-step questions, it cannot always activate the correct knowledge path for multi-step reasoning tasks. The chain of thought (CoT), which often contains Zero-shot CoT and few-shot CoT, is a recently developed prompting method that is capable of explaining the reasoning process to the LLM and outperforms simple prompting in three challenging reasoning tasks, including arithmetic, symbolic, and common-sense reasoning. This paper proposes a code-level self-prompt Zero-shot CoT (SelfzCoT) that takes advantage of an entity node or reasoning path of representing knowledge to activate deeper knowledge of larger path lengths within LLM in a graph way. It is done with three iterative steps in the format of step-by-step reasoning that can be easily adjusted or extended to different kinds of tasks.

As a vital step toward the intelligent agent, Action understanding matters for intelligent agents and has attracted long-term attention. It can be formed as the mapping from the action physical space to the semantic space. Typically, researchers built action datasets according to idiosyncratic choices to define classes and push the envelope of benchmarks respectively. Thus, datasets are incompatible with each other like "Isolated Islands" due to semantic gaps and various class granularities, e.g., do housework in dataset A and wash plate in dataset B. We argue that a more principled semantic space is an urgent need to concentrate the community efforts and enable us to use all datasets together to pursue generalizable action learning. To this end, we design a structured action semantic space in view of verb taxonomy hierarchy and covering massive actions. By aligning the classes of previous datasets to our semantic space, we gather (image/video/skeleton/MoCap) datasets into a unified database in a unified label system, i.e., bridging ``isolated islands'' into a "Pangea". Accordingly, we propose a novel model mapping from the physical space to semantic space to fully use Pangea. In extensive experiments, our new system shows significant superiority, especially in transfer learning. Code and data will be made publicly available.

Machine learning models -- including prominent zero-shot models -- are often trained on datasets whose labels are only a small proportion of a larger label space. Such spaces are commonly equipped with a metric that relates the labels via distances between them. We propose a simple approach to exploit this information to adapt the trained model to reliably predict new classes -- or, in the case of zero-shot prediction, to improve its performance -- without any additional training. Our technique is a drop-in replacement of the standard prediction rule, swapping argmax with the Fr\'echet mean. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis for this approach, studying (i) learning-theoretic results trading off label space diameter, sample complexity, and model dimension, (ii) characterizations of the full range of scenarios in which it is possible to predict any unobserved class, and (iii) an optimal active learning-like next class selection procedure to obtain optimal training classes for when it is not possible to predict the entire range of unobserved classes. Empirically, using easily-available external metrics, our proposed approach, Loki, gains up to 29.7% relative improvement over SimCLR on ImageNet and scales to hundreds of thousands of classes. When no such metric is available, Loki can use self-derived metrics from class embeddings and obtains a 10.5% improvement on pretrained zero-shot models such as CLIP.

For a small inoffensive treat, Jaffa Cakes can cause a lot of debate. Should you eat it all in one or nibble off the edge before the jelly? These are questions asked in households across the UK, and while theses questions may always remain a mystery, McVitie's amazed fans in 2020 by putting an end to one debate. The Edinburgh-biscuit company revealed the chocolate is actually on the bottom of the Jaffa Cake, contrary to popular belief. In a screenshot of a Twitter conservation shared widely on UK Facebook groups, McVitie's appeared to have confirmed that chocolate is at the bottom of a Jaffa Cake UK social media user known as David claimed to have asked the Jaffa Cake team to confirm which side of the treat is the top via Facebook Messenger.

In the 1983 movie WarGames, the US defence department runs a superintelligent central computer that is hacked into by a teenager, who unwittingly almost causes a nuclear Armageddon. The end of the world is averted when the computer, known as Joshua, learns, after playing tic-tac-toe with the teenager, that nuclear war cannot have a winner. The insight causes him to rescind missile launch orders with the comment: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." Joshua embodied the idea that a superintelligent AI would have an anthropomorphic mindset.