Objective To develop soft prompt-based learning algorithms for large language models (LLMs), examine the shape of prompts, prompt-tuning using frozen/unfrozen LLMs, transfer learning, and few-shot learning abilities. Methods We developed a soft prompt-based LLM model and compared 4 training strategies including (1) fine-tuning without prompts; (2) hard-prompt with unfrozen LLMs; (3) soft-prompt with unfrozen LLMs; and (4) soft-prompt with frozen LLMs. We evaluated 7 pretrained LLMs using the 4 training strategies for clinical concept and relation extraction on two benchmark datasets. We evaluated the transfer learning ability of the prompt-based learning algorithms in a cross-institution setting. We also assessed the few-shot learning ability. Results and Conclusion When LLMs are unfrozen, GatorTron-3.9B with soft prompting achieves the best strict F1-scores of 0.9118 and 0.8604 for concept extraction, outperforming the traditional fine-tuning and hard prompt-based models by 0.6~3.1% and 1.2~2.9%, respectively; GatorTron-345M with soft prompting achieves the best F1-scores of 0.8332 and 0.7488 for end-to-end relation extraction, outperforming the other two models by 0.2~2% and 0.6~11.7%, respectively. When LLMs are frozen, small (i.e., 345 million parameters) LLMs have a big gap to be competitive with unfrozen models; scaling LLMs up to billions of parameters makes frozen LLMs competitive with unfrozen LLMs. For cross-institute evaluation, soft prompting with a frozen GatorTron-8.9B model achieved the best performance. This study demonstrates that (1) machines can learn soft prompts better than humans, (2) frozen LLMs have better few-shot learning ability and transfer learning ability to facilitate muti-institution applications, and (3) frozen LLMs require large models.

Since the invention of computers, communication through natural language (actual human language) has been a dream technology. However, natural language is extremely difficult to mathematically formulate, making it difficult to realize as an algorithm without considering programming. While there have been numerous technological developments, one cannot say that any results allowing free utilization have been achieved thus far. In the case of language learning in humans, for instance when learning one's mother tongue or foreign language, one must admit that this process is similar to the adage "practice makes perfect" in principle, even though the learning method is significant up to a point. Deep learning has played a central role in contemporary AI technology in recent years. When applied to natural language processing (NLP), this produced unprecedented results. Achievements exceeding the initial predictions have been reported from the results of learning vast amounts of textual data using deep learning. For instance, four arithmetic operations could be performed without explicit learning, thereby enabling the explanation of complex images and the generation of images from corresponding explanatory texts. It is an accurate example of the learner embodying the concept of "practice makes perfect" by using vast amounts of textual data. This report provides a technological explanation of how cutting-edge NLP has made it possible to realize the "practice makes perfect" principle. Additionally, examples of how this can be applied to business are provided. We reported in June 2022 in Japanese on the NLP movement from late 2021 to early 2022. We would like to summarize this as a memorandum since this is just the initial movement leading to the current large language models (LLMs).

Humanoid robots are well suited for human habitats due to their morphological similarity, but developing controllers for them is a challenging task that involves multiple sub-problems, such as control, planning and perception. In this paper, we introduce a method to simplify controller design by enabling users to train and fine-tune robot control policies using natural language commands. We first learn a neural network policy that generates behaviors given a natural language command, such as "walk forward", by combining Large Language Models (LLMs), motion retargeting, and motion imitation. Based on the synthesized motion, we iteratively fine-tune by updating the text prompt and querying LLMs to find the best checkpoint associated with the closest motion in history. We validate our approach using a simulated Digit humanoid robot and demonstrate learning of diverse motions, such as walking, hopping, and kicking, without the burden of complex reward engineering. In addition, we show that our iterative refinement enables us to learn 3x times faster than a naive formulation that learns from scratch.

The application of machine learning (ML) in a range of geospatial tasks is increasingly common but often relies on globally available covariates such as satellite imagery that can either be expensive or lack predictive power. Here we explore the question of whether the vast amounts of knowledge found in Internet language corpora, now compressed within large language models (LLMs), can be leveraged for geospatial prediction tasks. We first demonstrate that LLMs embed remarkable spatial information about locations, but naively querying LLMs using geographic coordinates alone is ineffective in predicting key indicators like population density. We then present GeoLLM, a novel method that can effectively extract geospatial knowledge from LLMs with auxiliary map data from OpenStreetMap. We demonstrate the utility of our approach across multiple tasks of central interest to the international community, including the measurement of population density and economic livelihoods. Across these tasks, our method demonstrates a 70% improvement in performance (measured using Pearson's r With GeoLLM, we observe that GPT-3.5 outperforms Llama 2 and RoBERTa by 19% and 51% respectively, suggesting that the performance of our method scales well with the size of the model and its pretraining dataset. Our experiments reveal that LLMs are remarkably sample-efficient, rich in geospatial information, and robust across the globe. Crucially, GeoLLM shows promise in mitigating the limitations of existing geospatial covariates and complementing them well. The covariates used in these predictions include geographical coordinates, remote sensing data, satellite imagery, human mobility data (Chang et al., 2022), and phone metadata (Blumenstock et al., 2015; Burke et al., 2019). While having access to quality covariates is essential, it can be challenging due to limited spatiotemporal coverage, high costs, and accessibility barriers (Ball et al., 2017).

The Uniform Information Density principle posits that humans prefer to spread information evenly during language production. In this work, we examine if the UID principle can help capture differences between Large Language Models (LLMs) and human-generated text. We propose GPT-who, the first psycholinguistically-aware multi-class domain-agnostic statistical-based detector. This detector employs UID-based features to model the unique statistical signature of each LLM and human author for accurate authorship attribution. We evaluate our method using 4 large-scale benchmark datasets and find that GPT-who outperforms state-of-the-art detectors (both statistical- & non-statistical-based) such as GLTR, GPTZero, OpenAI detector, and ZeroGPT by over $20$% across domains. In addition to superior performance, it is computationally inexpensive and utilizes an interpretable representation of text articles. We present the largest analysis of the UID-based representations of human and machine-generated texts (over 400k articles) to demonstrate how authors distribute information differently, and in ways that enable their detection using an off-the-shelf LM without any fine-tuning. We find that GPT-who can distinguish texts generated by very sophisticated LLMs, even when the overlying text is indiscernible.

Large language models (LLMs) achieved remarkable performance across various tasks. However, they face challenges in managing long documents and extended conversations, due to significantly increased computational requirements, both in memory and inference time, and potential context truncation when the input exceeds the LLM's fixed context length. This paper proposes a method called Selective Context that enhances the inference efficiency of LLMs by identifying and pruning redundancy in the input context to make the input more compact. We test our approach using common data sources requiring long context processing: arXiv papers, news articles, and long conversations, on tasks of summarisation, question answering, and response generation. Experimental results show that Selective Context significantly reduces memory cost and decreases generation latency while maintaining comparable performance compared to that achieved when full context is used. Specifically, we achieve a 50\% reduction in context cost, resulting in a 36\% reduction in inference memory usage and a 32\% reduction in inference time, while observing only a minor drop of .023 in BERTscore and .038 in faithfulness on four downstream applications, indicating that our method strikes a good balance between efficiency and performance.

AI models are increasing in size and recent advancement in the community has shown that unlike HPC applications where double precision datatype are required, lower-precision datatypes such as fp8 or int4 are sufficient to bring the same model quality both for training and inference. Following these trends, GPU vendors such as NVIDIA and AMD have added hardware support for fp16, fp8 and int8 GeMM operations with an exceptional performance via Tensor Cores. However, this paper proposes a new algorithm called msGeMM which shows that AI models with low-precision datatypes can run with ~2.5x fewer multiplication and add instructions. Efficient implementation of this algorithm requires special CUDA cores with the ability to add elements from a small look-up table at the rate of Tensor Cores.

Entity Resolution (ER) is the problem of semi-automatically determining when two entities refer to the same underlying entity, with applications ranging from healthcare to e-commerce. Traditional ER solutions required considerable manual expertise, including feature engineering, as well as identification and curation of training data. In many instances, such techniques are highly dependent on the domain. With recent advent in large language models (LLMs), there is an opportunity to make ER much more seamless and domain-independent. However, it is also well known that LLMs can pose risks, and that the quality of their outputs can depend on so-called prompt engineering. Unfortunately, a systematic experimental study on the effects of different prompting methods for addressing ER, using LLMs like ChatGPT, has been lacking thus far. This paper aims to address this gap by conducting such a study. Although preliminary in nature, our results show that prompting can significantly affect the quality of ER, although it affects some metrics more than others, and can also be dataset dependent.

We introduce the fundamental ideas and challenges of Predictable AI, a nascent research area that explores the ways in which we can anticipate key indicators of present and future AI ecosystems. We argue that achieving predictability is crucial for fostering trust, liability, control, alignment and safety of AI ecosystems, and thus should be prioritised over performance. While distinctive from other areas of technical and non-technical AI research, the questions, hypotheses and challenges relevant to Predictable AI were yet to be clearly described. This paper aims to elucidate them, calls for identifying paths towards AI predictability and outlines the potential impact of this emergent field.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered wide attention and led to successful products such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. Their proficiency in adhering to instructions and delivering harmless, helpful, and honest (3H) responses can largely be attributed to the technique of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). In this paper, we aim to link the research in conventional RL to RL techniques used in LLM research. Demystify this technique by discussing why, when, and how RL excels. Furthermore, we explore potential future avenues that could either benefit from or contribute to RLHF research. Highlighted Takeaways: 1. RLHF is Online Inverse RL with Offline Demonstration Data. 2. RLHF $>$ SFT because Imitation Learning (and Inverse RL) $>$ Behavior Cloning (BC) by alleviating the problem of compounding error. 3. The RM step in RLHF generates a proxy of the expensive human feedback, such an insight can be generalized to other LLM tasks such as prompting evaluation and optimization where feedback is also expensive. 4. The policy learning in RLHF is more challenging than conventional problems studied in IRL due to their high action dimensionality and feedback sparsity. 5. The main superiority of PPO over off-policy value-based methods is its stability gained from (almost) on-policy data and conservative policy updates.