Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in modeling sequential textual data and generalizing across diverse tasks. However, adapting LLMs to effectively handle structural data, such as knowledge graphs or web data, remains a challenging problem. Some approaches adopt complex strategies to convert graphs into text sequences, resulting in significant token overhead and rendering them impractical for large-scale graphs. Others introduce additional modules to encode graphs into fixed-size token representations for LLMs. However, these methods typically require large-scale post-training on graph-text corpus and complex alignment procedures, yet often yield sub-optimal results due to poor modality alignment. Inspired by in-parameter knowledge injection for test-time adaptation of LLMs, we propose GRIP, a novel framework that equips LLMs with the ability to internalize complex relational information from graphs through carefully designed fine-tuning tasks. This knowledge is efficiently stored within lightweight LoRA parameters, enabling the fine-tuned LLM to perform a wide range of graph-related tasks without requiring access to the original graph at inference time. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

License Multi-LexSum is distributed under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By).

Understanding causal relationships across modalities is a core challenge for multimodal models operating in real-world environments. We introduce ISO-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating whether models can infer causal dependencies between visual observations and procedural text. Each example presents an image of a task step and a text snippet from a plan, with the goal of deciding whether the visual step occurs before or after the referenced text step. Evaluation results on ten frontier vision-language models show underwhelming performance: the best zero-shot F1 is only 0.57, and chain-of-thought reasoning yields only modest gains (up to 0.62 F1), largely behind humans (0.98 F1). Our analysis further highlights concrete directions for improving causal understanding in multimodal models.

Financial documents are filled with specialized terminology, arcane jargon, and curious acronyms that pose challenges for general-purpose text embeddings. Yet, few text embeddings specialized for finance have been reported in the literature, perhaps in part due to a lack of public datasets and benchmarks. We present BAM embeddings, a set of text embeddings finetuned on a carefully constructed dataset of 14.3M query-passage pairs. Demonstrating the benefits of domain-specific training, BAM embeddings achieve Recall@1 of 62.8% on a held-out test set, vs. only 39.2% for the best general-purpose text embedding from OpenAI. Further, BAM embeddings increase question answering accuracy by 8% on FinanceBench and show increased sensitivity to the finance-specific elements that are found in detailed, forward-looking and company and date-specific queries. To support further research we describe our approach in detail, quantify the importance of hard negative mining and dataset scale.

Creating specialized large language models requires vast amounts of clean, special purpose data for training and fine-tuning. With only a handful of existing large-scale, domain-specific datasets, creation of new datasets is required in most applications. This requires the development of new application-specific filtering of web-scale data. Filtering with a high-performance, general-purpose LLM such as GPT-4o can be highly effective, but this is extremely expensive at web-scale. This paper proposes SIEVE, a lightweight alternative that matches GPT-4o accuracy at a fraction of the cost. SIEVE can perform up to 500 filtering operations for the cost of one GPT-4o filtering call. The key to SIEVE is a seamless integration of GPT-4o and lightweight T5 models, using active learning to fine-tune T5 in the background with a small number of calls to GPT-4o. Once trained, it performs as well as GPT-4o at a tiny fraction of the cost. We experimentally validate SIEVE on the OpenWebText dataset, using five highly customized filter tasks targeting high quality and domain-specific content. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method in curating large, high-quality datasets for language model training at a substantially lower cost (1%) than existing techniques. To further validate SIEVE, experiments show that SIEVE and GPT-4o achieve similar accuracy, with human evaluators preferring SIEVE's filtering results to those of GPT-4o.

The increasing use of text as data in social science research necessitates the development of valid, consistent, reproducible, and efficient methods for generating text-based concept measures. This paper presents a novel method that leverages the internal hidden states of large language models (LLMs) to generate these concept measures. Specifically, the proposed method learns a concept vector that captures how the LLM internally represents the target concept, then estimates the concept value for text data by projecting the text's LLM hidden states onto the concept vector. Three replication studies demonstrate the method's effectiveness in producing highly valid, consistent, and reproducible text-based measures across various social science research contexts, highlighting its potential as a valuable tool for the research community.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities. Their powerful generative abilities enable flexible responses based on various queries or instructions. Emerging as widely adopted generalists for diverse tasks, LLMs are still vulnerable to backdoors. This paper proposes an editing-based generative backdoor, named MEGen, aiming to create a customized backdoor for NLP tasks with the least side effects. In our approach, we first leverage a language model to insert a trigger selected on fixed metrics into the input, then design a pipeline of model editing to directly embed a backdoor into an LLM. By adjusting a small set of local parameters with a mini-batch of samples, MEGen significantly enhances time efficiency and achieves high robustness. Experimental results indicate that our backdoor attack strategy achieves a high attack success rate on poison data while maintaining the model's performance on clean data. Notably, the backdoored model, when triggered, can freely output pre-set dangerous information while successfully completing downstream tasks. This suggests that future LLM applications could be guided to deliver certain dangerous information, thus altering the LLM's generative style. We believe this approach provides insights for future LLM applications and the execution of backdoor attacks on conversational AI systems.

Instruction finetuning (IFT) is critical for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow instructions. While many effective IFT datasets have been introduced recently, they predominantly focus on high-resource languages like English. To better align LLMs across a broad spectrum of languages and tasks, we propose a fully synthetic, novel taxonomy (Evol) guided Multilingual, Multi-turn instruction finetuning dataset, called M2Lingual. It is constructed by first selecting a diverse set of seed examples and then utilizing the proposed Evol taxonomy to convert these seeds into complex and challenging multi-turn instructions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of M2Lingual by training LLMs of varying sizes and showcasing the enhanced performance across a diverse set of languages. We contribute the 2 step Evol taxonomy with the guided generation code: https://github.com/ServiceNow/M2Lingual, as well as the first fully synthetic, general and task-oriented, multi-turn, multilingual dataset built with Evol - M2Lingual: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ServiceNow-AI/ M2Lingual - containing 182K total IFT pairs, covering 70 languages and 17+ NLP tasks.

Many real-world applications (e.g., note taking, search) require extracting a sentence or paragraph from a document and showing that snippet to a human outside of the source document. Yet, users may find snippets difficult to understand as they lack context from the original document. In this work, we use language models to rewrite snippets from scientific documents to be read on their own. First, we define the requirements and challenges for this user-facing decontextualization task, such as clarifying where edits occur and handling references to other documents. Second, we propose a framework that decomposes the task into three stages: question generation, question answering, and rewriting. Using this framework, we collect gold decontextualizations from experienced scientific article readers. We then conduct a range of experiments across state-of-the-art commercial and open-source language models to identify how to best provide missing-but-relevant information to models for our task. Finally, we develop QaDecontext, a simple prompting strategy inspired by our framework that improves over end-to-end prompting. We conclude with analysis that finds, while rewriting is easy, question generation and answering remain challenging for today's models.

We evaluated the capability of a state-of-the-art generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model to perform semantic annotation of short text snippets (one to few sentences) coming from legal documents of various types. Discussions of potential uses (e.g., document drafting, summarization) of this emerging technology in legal domain have intensified, but to date there has not been a rigorous analysis of these large language models' (LLM) capacity in sentence-level semantic annotation of legal texts in zero-shot learning settings. Yet, this particular type of use could unlock many practical applications (e.g., in contract review) and research opportunities (e.g., in empirical legal studies). We fill the gap with this study. We examined if and how successfully the model can semantically annotate small batches of short text snippets (10-50) based exclusively on concise definitions of the semantic types. We found that the GPT model performs surprisingly well in zero-shot settings on diverse types of documents (F1=.73 on a task involving court opinions, .86 for contracts, and .54 for statutes and regulations). These findings can be leveraged by legal scholars and practicing lawyers alike to guide their decisions in integrating LLMs in wide range of workflows involving semantic annotation of legal texts.