Existing research predominantly focuses on developing powerful language learning models (LLMs) for mathematical reasoning within monolingual languages, with few explorations in preserving efficacy in a multilingual context. To bridge this gap, this paper pioneers exploring and training powerful Multilingual Math Reasoning (xMR) LLMs. Firstly, by utilizing translation, we construct the first multilingual math reasoning instruction dataset, MGSM8KInstruct, encompassing ten distinct languages, thus addressing the issue of training data scarcity in xMR tasks. Based on the collected dataset, we propose different training strategies to build powerful xMR LLMs, named MathOctopus, notably outperform conventional open-source LLMs and exhibit superiority over ChatGPT in few-shot scenarios. Notably, MathOctopus-13B reaches 47.6% accuracy which exceeds ChatGPT 46.3% on MGSM testset. Beyond remarkable results, we unearth several pivotal observations and insights from extensive experiments: (1) When extending the rejection sampling strategy to the multilingual context, it proves effective for model performances, albeit limited. (2) Employing parallel corpora for math Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) across multiple languages not only significantly enhances model performance multilingually but also elevates their monolingual performance. This indicates that crafting multilingual corpora can be regarded as a vital strategy for enhancing model performance in a specific language, especially in mathematical reasoning tasks. For instance, MathOctopus-7B improves its counterparts that trained on English from 42.2% to 50.8% on GSM8K testset.

The recent success of large pre-trained language models (PLMs) heavily hinges on massive labeled data, which typically produces inferior performance in low-resource scenarios. To remedy this dilemma, we study self-training as one of the predominant semi-supervised learning (SSL) approaches, which utilizes large-scale unlabeled data to generate synthetic examples. However, too many noisy labels will hurt the model performance, and the self-training procedure requires multiple training iterations making it more expensive if all the model parameters of the PLM are updated. This paper presents UPET, a novel Uncertainty-aware Parameter-Efficient self-Training framework to effectively and efficiently address the labeled data scarcity issue. Specifically, we incorporate Monte Carlo (MC) dropout in Bayesian neural network (BNN) to perform uncertainty estimation for the teacher model and then judiciously select reliable pseudo-labeled examples based on confidence and certainty. During the student training, we introduce multiple parameter-efficient learning (PEL) paradigms that allow the optimization of only a small percentage of parameters. We also propose a novel Easy-Hard Contrastive Tuning to enhance the robustness and generalization. Extensive experiments over multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that UPET achieves a substantial improvement in terms of performance and efficiency. Our codes and data are released at https: //github.com/wjn1996/UPET.

The conversational machine reading comprehension (CMRC) task aims to answer questions in conversations, which has been a hot research topic in recent years because of its wide applications. However, existing CMRC benchmarks in which each conversation is assigned a static passage are inconsistent with real scenarios. Thus, model's comprehension ability towards real scenarios are hard to evaluate reasonably. To this end, we propose the first Chinese CMRC benchmark Orca and further provide zero-shot/few-shot settings to evaluate model's generalization ability towards diverse domains. We collect 831 hot-topic driven conversations with 4,742 turns in total. Each turn of a conversation is assigned with a response-related passage, aiming to evaluate model's comprehension ability more reasonably. The topics of conversations are collected from social media platform and cover 33 domains, trying to be consistent with real scenarios. Importantly, answers in Orca are all well-annotated natural responses rather than the specific spans or short phrase in previous datasets. Besides, we implement three strong baselines to tackle the challenge in Orca. The results indicate the great challenge of our CMRC benchmark. Our datatset and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/nuochenpku/Orca.

In recent years, Dialogue-style Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT4 have demonstrated immense potential in constructing open-domain dialogue agents. However, aligning these agents with specific characters or individuals remains a considerable challenge due to the complexities of character representation and the lack of comprehensive annotations. In this paper, we introduce the Harry Potter Dialogue (HPD) dataset, designed to advance the study of dialogue agents and character alignment. The dataset encompasses all dialogue sessions (in both English and Chinese) from the Harry Potter series and is annotated with vital background information, including dialogue scenes, speakers, character relationships, and attributes. These extensive annotations may empower LLMs to unlock character-driven dialogue capabilities. Furthermore, it can serve as a universal benchmark for evaluating how well can a LLM aligning with a specific character. We benchmark LLMs on HPD using both fine-tuning and in-context learning settings. Evaluation results reveal that although there is substantial room for improvement in generating high-quality, character-aligned responses, the proposed dataset is valuable in guiding models toward responses that better align with the character of Harry Potter.

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is an important area of conversation agents and draws a lot of attention. However, there is a notable limitation to current MRC benchmarks: The labeled answers are mostly either spans extracted from the target corpus or the choices of the given candidates, ignoring the natural aspect of high-quality responses. As a result, MRC models trained on these datasets can not generate human-like responses in real QA scenarios. To this end, we construct a new dataset called Penguin to promote the research of MRC, providing a training and test bed for natural response generation to real scenarios. Concretely, Penguin consists of 200k training data with high-quality fluent, and well-informed responses. Penguin is the first benchmark towards natural response generation in Chinese MRC on a relatively large scale. To address the challenges in Penguin, we develop two strong baselines: end-to-end and two-stage frameworks. Following that, we further design Prompt-BART: fine-tuning the pre-trained generative language models with a mixture of prefix prompts in Penguin. Extensive experiments validated the effectiveness of this design.

Personalized content-based recommender systems have become indispensable tools for users to navigate through the vast amount of content available on platforms like daily news websites and book recommendation services. However, existing recommenders face significant challenges in understanding the content of items. Large language models (LLMs), which possess deep semantic comprehension and extensive knowledge from pretraining, have proven to be effective in various natural language processing tasks. In this study, we explore the potential of leveraging both open- and closed-source LLMs to enhance content-based recommendation. With open-source LLMs, we utilize their deep layers as content encoders, enriching the representation of content at the embedding level. For closed-source LLMs, we employ prompting techniques to enrich the training data at the token level. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the high effectiveness of both types of LLMs and show the synergistic relationship between them. Notably, we observed a significant relative improvement of up to 19.32% compared to existing state-of-the-art recommendation models. These findings highlight the immense potential of both open- and closed-source of LLMs in enhancing content-based recommendation systems. We will make our code and LLM-generated data available for other researchers to reproduce our results.

Recently, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has delivered success on complex reasoning tasks, which aims at designing a simple prompt like ``Let's think step by step'' or multiple in-context exemplars with well-designed rationales to elicit Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate intermediate reasoning steps. However, the generated rationales often come with mistakes, making unfactual and unfaithful reasoning chains. To mitigate this brittleness, we propose a novel Chain-of-Knowledge (CoK) prompting, where we aim at eliciting LLMs to generate explicit pieces of knowledge evidence in the form of structure triple. This is inspired by our human behaviors, i.e., we can draw a mind map or knowledge map as the reasoning evidence in the brain before answering a complex question. Benefiting from CoK, we additionally introduce a F^2-Verification method to estimate the reliability of the reasoning chains in terms of factuality and faithfulness. For the unreliable response, the wrong evidence can be indicated to prompt the LLM to rethink. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can further improve the performance of commonsense, factual, symbolic, and arithmetic reasoning tasks.

Code pre-trained models (CodePTMs) have recently demonstrated a solid capacity to process various software intelligence tasks, e.g., code clone detection, code translation, and code summarization. The current mainstream method that deploys these models to downstream tasks is to fine-tune them on individual tasks, which is generally costly and needs sufficient data for large models. To tackle the issue, in this paper, we present TransCoder, a unified Transferable fine-tuning strategy for Code representation learning. Inspired by human inherent skills of knowledge generalization, TransCoder drives the model to learn better code-related meta-knowledge like human programmers. Specifically, we employ a tunable prefix encoder as the meta-learner to capture cross-task and cross-language transferable knowledge, respectively. Besides, tasks with minor training sample sizes and languages with small corpus can be remarkably benefited from our approach. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets clearly demonstrate that our method can lead to superior performance on various code-related tasks and encourage mutual reinforcement. We also show that TransCoder is applicable in low-resource scenarios.

Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have garnered significant attention for their versatility and potential for solving a wide spectrum of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the cost of running these PLMs may be prohibitive. Furthermore, PLMs may not be open-sourced due to commercial considerations and potential risks of misuse, such as GPT-3. The parameters and gradients of PLMs are unavailable in this scenario. To solve the issue, black-box tuning has been proposed, which utilizes derivative-free optimization (DFO), instead of gradient descent, for training task-specific continuous prompts. However, these gradient-free methods still exhibit a significant gap compared to gradient-based methods. In this paper, we introduce gradient descent into black-box tuning scenario through knowledge distillation. Furthermore, we propose a novel method GDFO, which integrates gradient descent and derivative-free optimization to optimize task-specific continuous prompts in a harmonized manner. Experimental results show that GDFO can achieve significant performance gains over previous state-of-the-art methods.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing power on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, tuning these models for downstream tasks usually needs exorbitant costs or is unavailable due to commercial considerations. Recently, black-box tuning has been proposed to address this problem by optimizing task-specific prompts without accessing the gradients and hidden representations. However, most existing works have yet fully exploited the potential of gradient-free optimization under the scenario of few-shot learning. In this paper, we describe BBT-RGB, a suite of straightforward and complementary techniques for enhancing the efficiency and performance of black-box optimization. Specifically, our method includes three plug-and-play components: (1) Two-stage derivative-free optimization strategy that facilitates fast convergence and mitigates overfitting; (2) Automatic verbalizer construction with its novel usage under few-shot settings; (3) Better prompt initialization policy based on instruction search and auto-selected demonstration. Extensive experiments across various tasks on natural language understanding and inference demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/QiushiSun/BBT-RGB.