We present the e-Llama models: 8 billion and 70 billion parameter large language models that are adapted towards the e-commerce domain. These models are meant as foundation models with deep knowledge about e-commerce, that form a base for instruction- and fine-tuning. The e-Llama models are obtained by continuously pretraining the Llama 3.1 base models on 1 trillion tokens of domain-specific data. We discuss our approach and motivate our choice of hyperparameters with a series of ablation studies. To quantify how well the models have been adapted to the e-commerce domain, we define and implement a set of multilingual, e-commerce specific evaluation tasks. We show that, when carefully choosing the training setup, the Llama 3.1 models can be adapted towards the new domain without sacrificing significant performance on general domain tasks. We also explore the possibility of merging the adapted model and the base model for a better control of the performance trade-off between domains.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has been applied in many scenarios to augment large language models (LLMs) with external documents provided by retrievers. However, a semantic gap exists between LLMs and retrievers due to differences in their training objectives and architectures. This misalignment forces LLMs to passively accept the documents provided by the retrievers, leading to incomprehension in the generation process, where the LLMs are burdened with the task of distinguishing these documents using their inherent knowledge. This paper proposes R$^2$AG, a novel enhanced RAG framework to fill this gap by incorporating Retrieval information into Retrieval Augmented Generation. Specifically, R$^2$AG utilizes the nuanced features from the retrievers and employs a R$^2$-Former to capture retrieval information. Then, a retrieval-aware prompting strategy is designed to integrate retrieval information into LLMs' generation. Notably, R$^2$AG suits low-source scenarios where LLMs and retrievers are frozen. Extensive experiments across five datasets validate the effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency of R$^2$AG. Our analysis reveals that retrieval information serves as an anchor to aid LLMs in the generation process, thereby filling the semantic gap.

While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has been a straightforward approach for tailoring the output of foundation large language model (LLM) to specific preferences, concerns have been raised about the depth of this alignment, with some critiques suggesting it is merely "superficial". We critically examine this hypothesis within the scope of cross-lingual generation tasks, proposing that the effectiveness of SFT may be constrained by its reliance on prior tokens to guide cross-lingual generation. Based on this crucial insight, and in response to the challenges posed by the costly and limited availability of non-English data for SFT, we introduce a novel training-free alignment method named PreTTY, which employs minimal task-related prior tokens to bridge the foundation LLM and the SFT LLM, achieving comparable performance without training. Experiments on machine translation and part-of-speech tagging across eight languages demonstrate the efficacy of PreTTY in cross-lingual settings. Remarkably, by initiating the decoding process with only one or two prior tokens, foundation LLMs can achieve performance comparable to their SFT counterparts. This method presents a cost-effective alternative to SFT and advances the democratization of multilingual LLMs.

The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has successfully introduced standards for global mobility. However, the volume and complexity of these standards has increased over time, thus complicating access to relevant information for vendors and service providers. Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in particular Large Language Models (LLMs), may provide faster access to relevant information. In this paper, we evaluate the capability of state-of-art LLMs to be used as Question Answering (QA) assistants for 3GPP document reference. Our contribution is threefold. First, we provide a benchmark and measuring methods for evaluating performance of LLMs. Second, we do data preprocessing and fine-tuning for one of these LLMs and provide guidelines to increase accuracy of the responses that apply to all LLMs. Third, we provide a model of our own, TeleRoBERTa, that performs on-par with foundation LLMs but with an order of magnitude less number of parameters. Results show that LLMs can be used as a credible reference tool on telecom technical documents, and thus have potential for a number of different applications from troubleshooting and maintenance, to network operations and software product development.

LLMs have become increasingly capable at accomplishing a range of specialized-tasks and can be utilized to expand equitable access to medical knowledge. Most medical LLMs have involved extensive fine-tuning, leveraging specialized medical data and significant, thus costly, amounts of computational power. Many of the top performing LLMs are proprietary and their access is limited to very few research groups. However, open-source (OS) models represent a key area of growth for medical LLMs due to significant improvements in performance and an inherent ability to provide the transparency and compliance required in healthcare. We present OpenMedLM, a prompting platform which delivers state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for OS LLMs on medical benchmarks. We evaluated a range of OS foundation LLMs (7B-70B) on four medical benchmarks (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU medical-subset). We employed a series of prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought (random selection and kNN selection), and ensemble/self-consistency voting. We found that OpenMedLM delivers OS SOTA results on three common medical LLM benchmarks, surpassing the previous best performing OS models that leveraged computationally costly extensive fine-tuning. The model delivers a 72.6% accuracy on the MedQA benchmark, outperforming the previous SOTA by 2.4%, and achieves 81.7% accuracy on the MMLU medical-subset, establishing itself as the first OS LLM to surpass 80% accuracy on this benchmark. Our results highlight medical-specific emergent properties in OS LLMs which have not yet been documented to date elsewhere, and showcase the benefits of further leveraging prompt engineering to improve the performance of accessible LLMs for medical applications.

Purpose: To introduce the concept of using large language models (LLMs) to re-label structure names in accordance with the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) Task Group (TG)-263 standard, and to establish a benchmark for future studies to reference. Methods and Materials: The Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)-4 application programming interface (API) was implemented as a Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) storage server, which upon receiving a structure set DICOM file, prompts GPT-4 to re-label the structure names of both target volumes and normal tissues according to the AAPM TG-263. Three disease sites, prostate, head and neck, and thorax were selected for evaluation. For each disease site category, 150 patients were randomly selected for manually tuning the instructions prompt (in batches of 50) and 50 patients were randomly selected for evaluation. Structure names that were considered were those that were most likely to be relevant for studies utilizing structure contours for many patients. Results: The overall re-labeling accuracy of both target volumes and normal tissues for prostate, head and neck, and thorax cases was 96.0%, 98.5%, and 96.9% respectively. Re-labeling of target volumes was less accurate on average except for prostate - 100%, 93.1%, and 91.1% respectively. Conclusions: Given the accuracy of GPT-4 in re-labeling structure names of both target volumes and normal tissues as presented in this work, LLMs are poised to be the preferred method for standardizing structure names in radiation oncology, especially considering the rapid advancements in LLM capabilities that are likely to continue.