Large language models (LLMs) are at the forefront of transforming numerous domains globally. However, their inclusivity and effectiveness remain limited for non-Latin scripts and low-resource languages. This paper tackles the imperative challenge of enhancing the multilingual performance of LLMs, specifically focusing on Generative models. Through systematic investigation and evaluation of diverse languages using popular question-answering (QA) datasets, we present novel techniques that unlock the true potential of LLMs in a polyglot landscape. Our approach encompasses three key strategies that yield remarkable improvements in multilingual proficiency. First, by meticulously optimizing prompts tailored for polyglot LLMs, we unlock their latent capabilities, resulting in substantial performance boosts across languages. Second, we introduce a new hybrid approach that synergizes GPT generation with multilingual embeddings and achieves significant multilingual performance improvement on critical tasks like QA and retrieval. Finally, to further propel the performance of polyglot LLMs, we introduce a novel learning algorithm that dynamically selects the optimal prompt strategy, LLM model, and embeddings per query. This dynamic adaptation maximizes the efficacy of LLMs across languages, outperforming best static and random strategies. Our results show substantial advancements in multilingual understanding and generation across a diverse range of languages.

Even when aggregate accuracy is high, state-of-the-art NLP models often fail systematically on specific subgroups of data, resulting in unfair outcomes and eroding user trust. Additional data collection may not help in addressing these weaknesses, as such challenging subgroups may be unknown to users, and underrepresented in the existing and new data. We propose Targeted Data Generation (TDG), a framework that automatically identifies challenging subgroups, and generates new data for those subgroups using large language models (LLMs) with a human in the loop. TDG estimates the expected benefit and potential harm of data augmentation for each subgroup, and selects the ones most likely to improve within group performance without hurting overall performance. In our experiments, TDG significantly improves the accuracy on challenging subgroups for state-of-the-art sentiment analysis and natural language inference models, while also improving overall test accuracy.

Retrieval-augmented methods have received increasing attention to support downstream tasks by leveraging useful information from external resources. Recent studies mainly focus on exploring retrieval to solve knowledge-intensive (KI) tasks. However, the potential of retrieval for most non-knowledge-intensive (NKI) tasks remains under-explored. There are two main challenges to leveraging retrieval-augmented methods for NKI tasks: 1) the demand for diverse relevance score functions and 2) the dilemma between training cost and task performance. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage framework for NKI tasks, named PGRA. In the first stage, we adopt a task-agnostic retriever to build a shared static index and select candidate evidence efficiently. In the second stage, we design a prompt-guided reranker to rerank the nearest evidence according to task-specific relevance for the reader. Experimental results show that PGRA outperforms other state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented methods. Our analyses further investigate the influence factors to model performance and demonstrate the generality of PGRA. Codes are available at https://github.com/THUNLP-MT/PGRA.

The chain-of-though (CoT) prompting methods were successful in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks thanks to their ability to unveil the underlying complex reasoning processes. Such reasoning processes typically exhibit implicitly structured steps. Recent efforts also started investigating methods to encourage more explicitly structured reasoning procedures to be captured. In this work, we propose Tab-CoT, a novel tabular-format CoT prompting method, which allows the complex reasoning process to be explicitly modelled in a highly structured manner. Despite its simplicity, we show that our approach is capable of performing reasoning across multiple dimensions (i.e., both rows and columns). We demonstrate our approach's strong zero-shot and few-shot capabilities through extensive experiments on a range of reasoning tasks.

In this paper, we present an efficient method for storing fine-tuned models by leveraging the low-rank properties of weight residuals. Our key observation is that weight residuals in large overparameterized models exhibit even stronger low-rank characteristics. Based on this insight, we propose Efficient Residual Encoding (ERE), a novel approach that achieves efficient storage of fine-tuned model weights by approximating the low-rank weight residuals. Furthermore, we analyze the robustness of weight residuals and push the limit of storage efficiency by utilizing additional quantization and layer-wise rank allocation. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly reduces memory footprint while preserving performance in various tasks and modalities.

Reasoning, a crucial aspect of NLP research, has not been adequately addressed by prevailing models including Large Language Model. Conversation reasoning, as a critical component of it, remains largely unexplored due to the absence of a well-designed cognitive model. In this paper, inspired by intuition theory on conversation cognition, we develop a conversation cognitive model (CCM) that explains how each utterance receives and activates channels of information recursively. Besides, we algebraically transformed CCM into a structural causal model (SCM) under some mild assumptions, rendering it compatible with various causal discovery methods. We further propose a probabilistic implementation of the SCM for utterance-level relation reasoning. By leveraging variational inference, it explores substitutes for implicit causes, addresses the issue of their unobservability, and reconstructs the causal representations of utterances through the evidence lower bounds. Moreover, we constructed synthetic and simulated datasets incorporating implicit causes and complete cause labels, alleviating the current situation where all available datasets are implicit-causes-agnostic. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods on synthetic, simulated, and real-world datasets. Finally, we analyze the performance of CCM under latent confounders and propose theoretical ideas for addressing this currently unresolved issue.

The need for more usable and explainable machine learning models in healthcare increases the importance of developing and utilizing causal discovery algorithms, which aim to discover causal relations by analyzing observational data. Explainable approaches aid clinicians and biologists in predicting the prognosis of diseases and suggesting proper treatments. However, very little research has been conducted at the crossroads between causal discovery, genomics, and breast cancer, and we aim to bridge this gap. Moreover, evaluation of causal discovery methods on real data is in general notoriously difficult because ground-truth causal relations are usually unknown, and accordingly, in this paper, we also propose to address the evaluation problem with large language models. In particular, we exploit suitable causal discovery algorithms to investigate how various perturbations in the genome can affect the survival of patients diagnosed with breast cancer. We used three main causal discovery algorithms: PC, Greedy Equivalence Search (GES), and a Generalized Precision Matrix-based one. We experiment with a subset of The Cancer Genome Atlas, which contains information about mutations, copy number variations, protein levels, and gene expressions for 705 breast cancer patients. Our findings reveal important factors related to the vital status of patients using causal discovery algorithms. However, the reliability of these results remains a concern in the medical domain. Accordingly, as another contribution of the work, the results are validated through language models trained on biomedical literature, such as BlueBERT and other large language models trained on medical corpora. Our results profess proper utilization of causal discovery algorithms and language models for revealing reliable causal relations for clinical applications.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of AI, demonstrating unprecedented capacity across various tasks. However, the inference process for LLMs comes with significant computational costs. In this paper, we propose an efficient LLM inference pipeline that harnesses the power of LLMs. Our approach begins by tapping into the potential of LLMs to accurately perceive and predict the response length with minimal overhead. By leveraging this information, we introduce an efficient sequence scheduling technique that groups queries with similar response lengths into micro-batches. We evaluate our approach on real-world instruction datasets using the LLaMA-based model, and our results demonstrate an impressive 86% improvement in inference throughput without compromising effectiveness. Notably, our method is orthogonal to other inference acceleration techniques, making it a valuable addition to many existing toolkits (e.g., FlashAttention, Quantization) for LLM inference.

Social media platforms are vital resources for sharing self-reported health experiences, offering rich data on various health topics. Despite advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) enabling large-scale social media data analysis, a gap remains in applying keyphrase extraction to health-related content. Keyphrase extraction is used to identify salient concepts in social media discourse without being constrained by predefined entity classes. This paper introduces a theme-driven keyphrase extraction framework tailored for social media, a pioneering approach designed to capture clinically relevant keyphrases from user-generated health texts. Themes are defined as broad categories determined by the objectives of the extraction task. We formulate this novel task of theme-driven keyphrase extraction and demonstrate its potential for efficiently mining social media text for the use case of treatment for opioid use disorder. This paper leverages qualitative and quantitative analysis to demonstrate the feasibility of extracting actionable insights from social media data and efficiently extracting keyphrases using minimally supervised NLP models. Our contributions include the development of a novel data collection and curation framework for theme-driven keyphrase extraction and the creation of MOUD-Keyphrase, the first dataset of its kind comprising human-annotated keyphrases from a Reddit community. We also identify the scope of minimally supervised NLP models to extract keyphrases from social media data efficiently. Lastly, we found that a large language model (ChatGPT) outperforms unsupervised keyphrase extraction models, and we evaluate its efficacy in this task.

Despite recent success in large language model (LLM) reasoning, LLMs struggle with hierarchical multi-step reasoning tasks like generating complex programs. For these tasks, humans often start with a high-level algorithmic design and implement each part gradually. We introduce Parsel, a framework enabling automatic implementation and validation of complex algorithms with code LLMs. With Parsel, we automatically decompose algorithmic tasks into hierarchical natural language function descriptions and then search over combinations of possible function implementations using tests. We show that Parsel can be used across domains requiring hierarchical reasoning, including program synthesis and robotic planning. We find that, using Parsel, LLMs solve more competition-level problems in the APPS dataset, resulting in pass rates over 75\% higher than prior results from directly sampling AlphaCode and Codex, while often using a smaller sample budget. Moreover, with automatically generated tests, we find that Parsel can improve the state-of-the-art pass@1 performance on HumanEval from 67\% to 85\%. We also find that LLM-generated robotic plans using Parsel are more than twice as likely to be considered accurate than directly generated plans. Lastly, we explore how Parsel addresses LLM limitations and discuss how Parsel may be useful for human programmers. We release our code at https://github.com/ezelikman/parsel