Daily Papers

Automatic lip-reading (ALR) aims to automatically transcribe spoken content from a speaker's silent lip motion captured in video. Current mainstream lip-reading approaches only use a single visual encoder to model input videos of a single scale. In this paper, we propose to enhance lip-reading by incorporating multi-scale video data and multi-encoder. Specifically, we first propose a novel multi-scale lip motion extraction algorithm based on the size of the speaker's face and an Enhanced ResNet3D visual front-end (VFE) to extract lip features at different scales. For the multi-encoder, in addition to the mainstream Transformer and Conformer, we also incorporate the recently proposed Branchformer and E-Branchformer as visual encoders. In the experiments, we explore the influence of different video data scales and encoders on ALR system performance and fuse the texts transcribed by all ALR systems using recognizer output voting error reduction (ROVER). Finally, our proposed approach placed second in the ICME 2024 ChatCLR Challenge Task 2, with a 21.52% reduction in character error rate (CER) compared to the official baseline on the evaluation set.

To promote speech processing and recognition research in driving scenarios, we build on the success of the Intelligent Cockpit Speech Recognition Challenge (ICSRC) held at ISCSLP 2022 and launch the ICASSP 2024 In-Car Multi-Channel Automatic Speech Recognition (ICMC-ASR) Challenge. This challenge collects over 100 hours of multi-channel speech data recorded inside a new energy vehicle and 40 hours of noise for data augmentation. Two tracks, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic speech diarization and recognition (ASDR) are set up, using character error rate (CER) and concatenated minimum permutation character error rate (cpCER) as evaluation metrics, respectively. Overall, the ICMC-ASR Challenge attracts 98 participating teams and receives 53 valid results in both tracks. In the end, first-place team USTCiflytek achieves a CER of 13.16% in the ASR track and a cpCER of 21.48% in the ASDR track, showing an absolute improvement of 13.08% and 51.4% compared to our challenge baseline, respectively.

This paper presents the second ChatGPT4PCG competition at the 2024 IEEE Conference on Games. In this edition of the competition, we follow the first edition, but make several improvements and changes. We introduce a new evaluation metric along with allowing a more flexible format for participants' submissions and making several improvements to the evaluation pipeline. Continuing from the first edition, we aim to foster and explore the realm of prompt engineering (PE) for procedural content generation (PCG). While the first competition saw success, it was hindered by various limitations; we aim to mitigate these limitations in this edition. We introduce diversity as a new metric to discourage submissions aimed at producing repetitive structures. Furthermore, we allow submission of a Python program instead of a prompt text file for greater flexibility in implementing advanced PE approaches, which may require control flow, including conditions and iterations. We also make several improvements to the evaluation pipeline with a better classifier for similarity evaluation and better-performing function signatures. We thoroughly evaluate the effectiveness of the new metric and the improved classifier. Additionally, we perform an ablation study to select a function signature to instruct ChatGPT for level generation. Finally, we provide implementation examples of various PE techniques in Python and evaluate their preliminary performance. We hope this competition serves as a resource and platform for learning about PE and PCG in general.

Conversational search requires accurate interpretation of user intent from complex multi-turn contexts. This paper presents ChatRetriever, which inherits the strong generalization capability of large language models to robustly represent complex conversational sessions for dense retrieval. To achieve this, we propose a simple and effective dual-learning approach that adapts LLM for retrieval via contrastive learning while enhancing the complex session understanding through masked instruction tuning on high-quality conversational instruction tuning data. Extensive experiments on five conversational search benchmarks demonstrate that ChatRetriever substantially outperforms existing conversational dense retrievers, achieving state-of-the-art performance on par with LLM-based rewriting approaches. Furthermore, ChatRetriever exhibits superior robustness in handling diverse conversational contexts. Our work highlights the potential of adapting LLMs for retrieval with complex inputs like conversational search sessions and proposes an effective approach to advance this research direction.

This paper presents the development of a specialized chatbot for materials science, leveraging the Llama-2 language model, and continuing pre-training on the expansive research articles in the materials science domain from the S2ORC dataset. The methodology involves an initial pretraining phase on over one million domain-specific papers, followed by an instruction-tuning process to refine the chatbot's capabilities. The chatbot is designed to assist researchers, educators, and students by providing instant, context-aware responses to queries in the field of materials science. We make the four trained checkpoints (7B, 13B, with or without chat ability) freely available to the research community at https://github.com/Xianjun-Yang/Quokka.

The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has shown great potential to develop more powerful conversational recommender systems (CRSs), which rely on natural language conversations to satisfy user needs. In this paper, we embark on an investigation into the utilization of ChatGPT for conversational recommendation, revealing the inadequacy of the existing evaluation protocol. It might over-emphasize the matching with the ground-truth items or utterances generated by human annotators, while neglecting the interactive nature of being a capable CRS. To overcome the limitation, we further propose an interactive Evaluation approach based on LLMs named iEvaLM that harnesses LLM-based user simulators. Our evaluation approach can simulate various interaction scenarios between users and systems. Through the experiments on two publicly available CRS datasets, we demonstrate notable improvements compared to the prevailing evaluation protocol. Furthermore, we emphasize the evaluation of explainability, and ChatGPT showcases persuasive explanation generation for its recommendations. Our study contributes to a deeper comprehension of the untapped potential of LLMs for CRSs and provides a more flexible and easy-to-use evaluation framework for future research endeavors. The codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/iEvaLM-CRS.

This paper presents UMASS_BioNLP team participation in the MEDIQA-Chat 2023 shared task for Task-A and Task-C. We focus especially on Task-C and propose a novel LLMs cooperation system named a doctor-patient loop to generate high-quality conversation data sets. The experiment results demonstrate that our approaches yield reasonable performance as evaluated by automatic metrics such as ROUGE, medical concept recall, BLEU, and Self-BLEU. Furthermore, we conducted a comparative analysis between our proposed method and ChatGPT and GPT-4. This analysis also investigates the potential of utilizing cooperation LLMs to generate high-quality datasets.

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of ChatGPT and GPT-4, state-of-the-art large language models (LLM) from the GPT series, and their prospective applications across diverse domains. Indeed, key innovations such as large-scale pre-training that captures knowledge across the entire world wide web, instruction fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have played significant roles in enhancing LLMs' adaptability and performance. We performed an in-depth analysis of 194 relevant papers on arXiv, encompassing trend analysis, word cloud representation, and distribution analysis across various application domains. The findings reveal a significant and increasing interest in ChatGPT/GPT-4 research, predominantly centered on direct natural language processing applications, while also demonstrating considerable potential in areas ranging from education and history to mathematics, medicine, and physics. This study endeavors to furnish insights into ChatGPT's capabilities, potential implications, ethical concerns, and offer direction for future advancements in this field.

Studying how people interact with large language models (LLMs) in real-world scenarios is increasingly important due to their widespread use in various applications. In this paper, we introduce LMSYS-Chat-1M, a large-scale dataset containing one million real-world conversations with 25 state-of-the-art LLMs. This dataset is collected from 210K unique IP addresses in the wild on our Vicuna demo and Chatbot Arena website. We offer an overview of the dataset's content, including its curation process, basic statistics, and topic distribution, highlighting its diversity, originality, and scale. We demonstrate its versatility through four use cases: developing content moderation models that perform similarly to GPT-4, building a safety benchmark, training instruction-following models that perform similarly to Vicuna, and creating challenging benchmark questions. We believe that this dataset will serve as a valuable resource for understanding and advancing LLM capabilities. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmsys/lmsys-chat-1m.

Chats emerge as an effective user-friendly approach for information retrieval, and are successfully employed in many domains, such as customer service, healthcare, and finance. However, existing image retrieval approaches typically address the case of a single query-to-image round, and the use of chats for image retrieval has been mostly overlooked. In this work, we introduce ChatIR: a chat-based image retrieval system that engages in a conversation with the user to elicit information, in addition to an initial query, in order to clarify the user's search intent. Motivated by the capabilities of today's foundation models, we leverage Large Language Models to generate follow-up questions to an initial image description. These questions form a dialog with the user in order to retrieve the desired image from a large corpus. In this study, we explore the capabilities of such a system tested on a large dataset and reveal that engaging in a dialog yields significant gains in image retrieval. We start by building an evaluation pipeline from an existing manually generated dataset and explore different modules and training strategies for ChatIR. Our comparison includes strong baselines derived from related applications trained with Reinforcement Learning. Our system is capable of retrieving the target image from a pool of 50K images with over 78% success rate after 5 dialogue rounds, compared to 75% when questions are asked by humans, and 64% for a single shot text-to-image retrieval. Extensive evaluations reveal the strong capabilities and examine the limitations of CharIR under different settings. Project repository is available at https://github.com/levymsn/ChatIR.

This paper presents the system description of our entry for the COLING 2025 RegNLP RIRAG (Regulatory Information Retrieval and Answer Generation) challenge, focusing on leveraging advanced information retrieval and answer generation techniques in regulatory domains. We experimented with a combination of embedding models, including Stella, BGE, CDE, and Mpnet, and leveraged fine-tuning and reranking for retrieving relevant documents in top ranks. We utilized a novel approach, LeSeR, which achieved competitive results with a recall@10 of 0.8201 and map@10 of 0.6655 for retrievals. This work highlights the transformative potential of natural language processing techniques in regulatory applications, offering insights into their capabilities for implementing a retrieval augmented generation system while identifying areas for future improvement in robustness and domain adaptation.

Human-produced emissions are growing at an alarming rate, causing already observable changes in the climate and environment in general. Each year global carbon dioxide emissions hit a new record, and it is reported that 0.5% of total US greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to data centres as of 2021. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked social interest in Large Language Models (LLMs), the new generation of Language Models with a large number of parameters and trained on massive amounts of data. Currently, numerous companies are releasing products featuring various LLMs, with many more models in development and awaiting release. Deep Learning research is a competitive field, with only models that reach top performance attracting attention and being utilized. Hence, achieving better accuracy and results is often the first priority, while the model's efficiency and the environmental impact of the study are neglected. However, LLMs demand substantial computational resources and are very costly to train, both financially and environmentally. It becomes essential to raise awareness and promote conscious decisions about algorithmic and hardware choices. Providing information on training time, the approximate carbon dioxide emissions and power consumption would assist future studies in making necessary adjustments and determining the compatibility of available computational resources with model requirements. In this study, we infused T5 LLM with external knowledge and fine-tuned the model for Question-Answering task. Furthermore, we calculated and reported the approximate environmental impact for both steps. The findings demonstrate that the smaller models may not always be sustainable options, and increased training does not always imply better performance. The most optimal outcome is achieved by carefully considering both performance and efficiency factors.

There has been a growing effort to replace hand extraction of data from research papers with automated data extraction based on natural language processing, language models, and recently, large language models (LLMs). Although these methods enable efficient extraction of data from large sets of research papers, they require a significant amount of up-front effort, expertise, and coding. In this work we propose the ChatExtract method that can fully automate very accurate data extraction with minimal initial effort and background, using an advanced conversational LLM. ChatExtract consists of a set of engineered prompts applied to a conversational LLM that both identify sentences with data, extract that data, and assure the data's correctness through a series of follow-up questions. These follow-up questions largely overcome known issues with LLMs providing factually inaccurate responses. ChatExtract can be applied with any conversational LLMs and yields very high quality data extraction. In tests on materials data we find precision and recall both close to 90% from the best conversational LLMs, like ChatGPT-4. We demonstrate that the exceptional performance is enabled by the information retention in a conversational model combined with purposeful redundancy and introducing uncertainty through follow-up prompts. These results suggest that approaches similar to ChatExtract, due to their simplicity, transferability, and accuracy are likely to become powerful tools for data extraction in the near future. Finally, databases for critical cooling rates of metallic glasses and yield strengths of high entropy alloys are developed using ChatExtract.

Language model (LLM) post-training, from DPO to distillation, can refine behaviors and unlock new skills, but the open science supporting these post-training techniques is still in its infancy. One limiting factor has been the difficulty of conducting large-scale comparative analyses of synthetic data generating models and LLM judges. To close this gap, we introduce WILDCHAT-50M, the largest public chat dataset to date. We extend the existing WildChat dataset to include responses not only from GPT, but from over 50 different open-weight models, ranging in size from 0.5B to 104B parameters. We conduct an extensive comparative analysis and demonstrate the potential of this dataset by creating RE-WILD, our own public SFT mix, which outperforms the recent Tulu-3 SFT mixture from Allen AI with only 40% as many samples. Our dataset, samples and code are available at https://github.com/penfever/wildchat-50m.

Over the last few years, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as the most important breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) that fundamentally transform research and developments in the field. ChatGPT represents one of the most exciting LLM systems developed recently to showcase impressive skills for language generation and highly attract public attention. Among various exciting applications discovered for ChatGPT in English, the model can process and generate texts for multiple languages due to its multilingual training data. Given the broad adoption of ChatGPT for English in different problems and areas, a natural question is whether ChatGPT can also be applied effectively for other languages or it is necessary to develop more language-specific technologies. The answer to this question requires a thorough evaluation of ChatGPT over multiple tasks with diverse languages and large datasets (i.e., beyond reported anecdotes), which is still missing or limited in current research. Our work aims to fill this gap for the evaluation of ChatGPT and similar LLMs to provide more comprehensive information for multilingual NLP applications. While this work will be an ongoing effort to include additional experiments in the future, our current paper evaluates ChatGPT on 7 different tasks, covering 37 diverse languages with high, medium, low, and extremely low resources. We also focus on the zero-shot learning setting for ChatGPT to improve reproducibility and better simulate the interactions of general users. Compared to the performance of previous models, our extensive experimental results demonstrate a worse performance of ChatGPT for different NLP tasks and languages, calling for further research to develop better models and understanding for multilingual learning.

This document presents a detailed description of the challenge on clarifying questions for dialogue systems (ClariQ). The challenge is organized as part of the Conversational AI challenge series (ConvAI3) at Search Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI) EMNLP workshop in 2020. The main aim of the conversational systems is to return an appropriate answer in response to the user requests. However, some user requests might be ambiguous. In IR settings such a situation is handled mainly thought the diversification of the search result page. It is however much more challenging in dialogue settings with limited bandwidth. Therefore, in this challenge, we provide a common evaluation framework to evaluate mixed-initiative conversations. Participants are asked to rank clarifying questions in an information-seeking conversations. The challenge is organized in two stages where in Stage 1 we evaluate the submissions in an offline setting and single-turn conversations. Top participants of Stage 1 get the chance to have their model tested by human annotators.

We introduce ChatGLM, an evolving family of large language models that we have been developing over time. This report primarily focuses on the GLM-4 language series, which includes GLM-4, GLM-4-Air, and GLM-4-9B. They represent our most capable models that are trained with all the insights and lessons gained from the preceding three generations of ChatGLM. To date, the GLM-4 models are pre-trained on ten trillions of tokens mostly in Chinese and English, along with a small set of corpus from 24 languages, and aligned primarily for Chinese and English usage. The high-quality alignment is achieved via a multi-stage post-training process, which involves supervised fine-tuning and learning from human feedback. Evaluations show that GLM-4 1) closely rivals or outperforms GPT-4 in terms of general metrics such as MMLU, GSM8K, MATH, BBH, GPQA, and HumanEval, 2) gets close to GPT-4-Turbo in instruction following as measured by IFEval, 3) matches GPT-4 Turbo (128K) and Claude 3 for long context tasks, and 4) outperforms GPT-4 in Chinese alignments as measured by AlignBench. The GLM-4 All Tools model is further aligned to understand user intent and autonomously decide when and which tool(s) touse -- including web browser, Python interpreter, text-to-image model, and user-defined functions -- to effectively complete complex tasks. In practical applications, it matches and even surpasses GPT-4 All Tools in tasks like accessing online information via web browsing and solving math problems using Python interpreter. Over the course, we have open-sourced a series of models, including ChatGLM-6B (three generations), GLM-4-9B (128K, 1M), GLM-4V-9B, WebGLM, and CodeGeeX, attracting over 10 million downloads on Hugging face in the year 2023 alone. The open models can be accessed through https://github.com/THUDM and https://huggingface.co/THUDM.

Large language models have shown good performances in generating code to meet human requirements. However, human requirements expressed in natural languages can be vague, incomplete, and ambiguous, leading large language models to misunderstand human requirements and make mistakes. Worse, it is difficult for a human user to refine the requirement. To help human users refine their requirements and improve large language models' code generation performances, we propose ChatCoder: a method to refine the requirements via chatting with large language models. We design a chat scheme in which the large language models will guide the human users to refine their expression of requirements to be more precise, unambiguous, and complete than before. Experiments show that ChatCoder has improved existing large language models' performance by a large margin. Besides, ChatCoder has the advantage over refine-based methods and LLMs fine-tuned via human response.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their significant potential to be applied for addressing various application tasks. However, traditional recommender systems continue to face great challenges such as poor interactivity and explainability, which actually also hinder their broad deployment in real-world systems. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel paradigm called Chat-Rec (ChatGPT Augmented Recommender System) that innovatively augments LLMs for building conversational recommender systems by converting user profiles and historical interactions into prompts. Chat-Rec is demonstrated to be effective in learning user preferences and establishing connections between users and products through in-context learning, which also makes the recommendation process more interactive and explainable. What's more, within the Chat-Rec framework, user's preferences can transfer to different products for cross-domain recommendations, and prompt-based injection of information into LLMs can also handle the cold-start scenarios with new items. In our experiments, Chat-Rec effectively improve the results of top-k recommendations and performs better in zero-shot rating prediction task. Chat-Rec offers a novel approach to improving recommender systems and presents new practical scenarios for the implementation of AIGC (AI generated content) in recommender system studies.

Recent studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) excel in diverse tasks through in-context learning (ICL) facilitated by task-specific prompts and examples. However, the existing literature shows that ICL encounters performance deterioration when exposed to adversarial inputs. Enhanced performance has been observed when ICL is augmented with natural language explanations (NLEs) (we refer to it as X-ICL). Thus, this work investigates whether X-ICL can improve the robustness of LLMs on a suite of seven adversarial and challenging natural language inference datasets. Moreover, we introduce a new approach to X-ICL by prompting an LLM (ChatGPT in our case) with few human-generated NLEs to produce further NLEs (we call it ChatGPT few-shot), which we show superior to both ChatGPT zero-shot and human-generated NLEs alone. We evaluate five popular LLMs (GPT3.5-turbo, LLaMa2, Vicuna, Zephyr, Mistral) and show that X-ICL with ChatGPT few-shot yields over 6% improvement over ICL. Furthermore, while prompt selection strategies were previously shown to significantly improve ICL on in-distribution test sets, we show that these strategies do not match the efficacy of the X-ICL paradigm in robustness-oriented evaluations.

We have tried to reproduce the results of the paper "Natural Language Inference over Interaction Space" submitted to ICLR 2018 conference as part of the ICLR 2018 Reproducibility Challenge. Initially, we were not aware that the code was available, so we started to implement the network from scratch. We have evaluated our version of the model on Stanford NLI dataset and reached 86.38% accuracy on the test set, while the paper claims 88.0% accuracy. The main difference, as we understand it, comes from the optimizers and the way model selection is performed.

Speech language models (SpeechLMs) accept speech input and produce speech output, allowing for more natural human-computer interaction compared to text-based large language models (LLMs). Traditional approaches for developing SpeechLMs are constrained by the limited availability of unsupervised speech data and parallel speech-text data, which are significantly less abundant than text pre-training data, thereby limiting their scalability as LLMs. We propose a novel approach to scaling speech-text pre-training by leveraging large-scale synthetic interleaved data derived from text corpora, eliminating the need for parallel speech-text datasets. Our method efficiently constructs speech-text interleaved data by sampling text spans from existing text corpora and synthesizing corresponding speech spans using a text-to-token model, bypassing the need to generate actual speech. We also employ a supervised speech tokenizer derived from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model by incorporating a vector-quantized bottleneck into the encoder. This supervised training approach results in discrete speech tokens with strong semantic preservation even at lower sampling rates (e.g. 12.5Hz), while still maintaining speech reconstruction quality. Starting from a pre-trained language model and scaling our pre-training to 1 trillion tokens (with 600B synthetic interleaved speech-text data), we achieve state-of-the-art performance in speech language modeling and spoken question answering, improving performance on spoken questions tasks from the previous SOTA of 13% (Moshi) to 31%. We further demonstrate that by fine-tuning the pre-trained model with speech dialogue data, we can develop an end-to-end spoken chatbot that achieves competitive performance comparable to existing baselines in both conversational abilities and speech quality, even operating exclusively in the speech domain.

This paper describes the systems submitted by team6 for ChatEval, the DSTC 11 Track 4 competition. We present three different approaches to predicting turn-level qualities of chatbot responses based on large language models (LLMs). We report improvement over the baseline using dynamic few-shot examples from a vector store for the prompts for ChatGPT. We also analyze the performance of the other two approaches and report needed improvements for future work. We developed the three systems over just two weeks, showing the potential of LLMs for this task. An ablation study conducted after the challenge deadline shows that the new Llama 2 models are closing the performance gap between ChatGPT and open-source LLMs. However, we find that the Llama 2 models do not benefit from few-shot examples in the same way as ChatGPT.

We introduce GLM-4-Voice, an intelligent and human-like end-to-end spoken chatbot. It supports both Chinese and English, engages in real-time voice conversations, and varies vocal nuances such as emotion, intonation, speech rate, and dialect according to user instructions. GLM-4-Voice uses an ultra-low bitrate (175bps), single-codebook speech tokenizer with 12.5Hz frame rate derived from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model by incorporating a vector-quantized bottleneck into the encoder. To efficiently transfer knowledge from text to speech modalities, we synthesize speech-text interleaved data from existing text pre-training corpora using a text-to-token model. We continue pre-training from the pre-trained text language model GLM-4-9B with a combination of unsupervised speech data, interleaved speech-text data, and supervised speech-text data, scaling up to 1 trillion tokens, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both speech language modeling and spoken question answering. We then fine-tune the pre-trained model with high-quality conversational speech data, achieving superior performance compared to existing baselines in both conversational ability and speech quality. The open models can be accessed through https://github.com/THUDM/GLM-4-Voice and https://huggingface.co/THUDM/glm-4-voice-9b.

The recent advances in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have achieved remarkable performance by leveraging human expertise. Yet, fully eliciting LLMs' potential for complex tasks requires navigating the vast search space of natural language prompts. While prompt engineering has shown promise, the requisite human-crafted prompts in trial-and-error attempts and the associated costs pose significant challenges. Crucially, the efficiency of prompt optimization hinges on the costly procedure of prompt evaluation. This work introduces Prompt-OIRL, an approach rooted in offline inverse reinforcement learning that seeks to bridge the gap between effective prompt evaluation and affordability. Our method draws on offline datasets from expert evaluations, employing Inverse-RL to derive a reward model for offline, query-dependent prompt evaluations. The advantages of Prompt-OIRL are manifold: it predicts prompt performance, is cost-efficient, produces human-readable results, and efficiently navigates the prompt space. We validate our method across four LLMs and three arithmetic datasets, highlighting its potential as a robust and effective tool for offline prompt evaluation and optimization. Our code as well as the offline datasets are released, and we highlight the Prompt-OIRL can be reproduced within a few hours using a single laptop using CPU

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in open-ended conversation, generating more accurate and personalized responses. However, their abilities to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions within real-world scenarios remain underexplored. This paper introduces MMRC, a Multi-Modal Real-world Conversation benchmark for evaluating six core open-ended abilities of MLLMs: information extraction, multi-turn reasoning, information update, image management, memory recall, and answer refusal. With data collected from real-world scenarios, MMRC comprises 5,120 conversations and 28,720 corresponding manually labeled questions, posing a significant challenge to existing MLLMs. Evaluations on 20 MLLMs in MMRC indicate an accuracy drop during open-ended interactions. We identify four common failure patterns: long-term memory degradation, inadequacies in updating factual knowledge, accumulated assumption of error propagation, and reluctance to say no. To mitigate these issues, we propose a simple yet effective NOTE-TAKING strategy, which can record key information from the conversation and remind the model during its responses, enhancing conversational capabilities. Experiments across six MLLMs demonstrate significant performance improvements.

Large language models (LLMs) provide a new way to build chatbots by accepting natural language prompts. Yet, it is unclear how to design prompts to power chatbots to carry on naturalistic conversations while pursuing a given goal, such as collecting self-report data from users. We explore what design factors of prompts can help steer chatbots to talk naturally and collect data reliably. To this aim, we formulated four prompt designs with different structures and personas. Through an online study (N = 48) where participants conversed with chatbots driven by different designs of prompts, we assessed how prompt designs and conversation topics affected the conversation flows and users' perceptions of chatbots. Our chatbots covered 79% of the desired information slots during conversations, and the designs of prompts and topics significantly influenced the conversation flows and the data collection performance. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of building chatbots with LLMs.

Open source large language models (LLMs) have shown great improvements in recent times. However, many of these models are focused solely on popular spoken languages. We present a high quality dataset of more than 70k prompt-response pairs in 74 languages which consist of human generated prompts and synthetic responses. We use this dataset to train a state-of-the-art open source English LLM to chat multilingually. We evaluate our model on MT-Bench chat benchmarks in 6 languages, finding that our multilingual model outperforms previous state-of-the-art open source LLMs across each language. We further find that training on more multilingual data is beneficial to the performance in a chosen target language (Japanese) compared to simply training on only data in that language. These results indicate the necessity of training on large amounts of high quality multilingual data to make a more accessible LLM.

This tutorial explores the advancements and challenges in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini. It addresses inherent limitations like temporal knowledge cutoffs, mathematical inaccuracies, and the generation of incorrect information, proposing solutions like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Program-Aided Language Models (PAL), and frameworks such as ReAct and LangChain. The integration of these techniques enhances LLM performance and reliability, especially in multi-step reasoning and complex task execution. The paper also covers fine-tuning strategies, including instruction fine-tuning, parameter-efficient methods like LoRA, and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) as well as Reinforced Self-Training (ReST). Additionally, it provides a comprehensive survey of transformer architectures and training techniques for LLMs. The toolbox for implementing these techniques is publicly available at https://github.com/giorgioroffo/large_language_models_open_suite

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to various language-related tasks. This paper focuses on the study of exploring generative LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 for relevance ranking in Information Retrieval (IR). Surprisingly, our experiments reveal that properly instructed ChatGPT and GPT-4 can deliver competitive, even superior results than supervised methods on popular IR benchmarks. Notably, GPT-4 outperforms the fully fine-tuned monoT5-3B on MS MARCO by an average of 2.7 nDCG on TREC datasets, an average of 2.3 nDCG on eight BEIR datasets, and an average of 2.7 nDCG on ten low-resource languages Mr.TyDi. Subsequently, we delve into the potential for distilling the ranking capabilities of ChatGPT into a specialized model. Our small specialized model that trained on 10K ChatGPT generated data outperforms monoT5 trained on 400K annotated MS MARCO data on BEIR. The code to reproduce our results is available at www.github.com/sunnweiwei/RankGPT

This paper presents the first ChatGPT4PCG Competition at the 2023 IEEE Conference on Games. The objective of this competition is for participants to create effective prompts for ChatGPT--enabling it to generate Science Birds levels with high stability and character-like qualities--fully using their creativity as well as prompt engineering skills. ChatGPT is a conversational agent developed by OpenAI. Science Birds is selected as the competition platform because designing an Angry Birds-like level is not a trivial task due to the in-game gravity; the quality of the levels is determined by their stability. To lower the entry barrier to the competition, we limit the task to the generation of capitalized English alphabetical characters. We also allow only a single prompt to be used for generating all the characters. Here, the quality of the generated levels is determined by their stability and similarity to the given characters. A sample prompt is provided to participants for their reference. An experiment is conducted to determine the effectiveness of several modified versions of this sample prompt on level stability and similarity by testing them on several characters. To the best of our knowledge, we believe that ChatGPT4PCG is the first competition of its kind and hope to inspire enthusiasm for prompt engineering in procedural content generation.

This paper introduces a novel approach to efficiently feeding knowledge to language models (LLMs) during prediction by integrating retrieval and generation processes within a unified framework. While the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model addresses gaps in LLMs' training data and knowledge limits, it is hindered by token limit restrictions and dependency on the retrieval system's accuracy. Our proposed architecture incorporates in-context vectors (ICV) to overcome these challenges. ICV recasts in-context learning by using latent embeddings of LLMs to create a vector that captures essential task information. This vector is then used to shift the latent states of the LLM, enhancing the generation process without adding demonstration examples to the prompt. ICV directly integrates information into the model, enabling it to process this information more effectively. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that ICV outperforms standard in-context learning and fine-tuning across question-answering, information retrieval, and other tasks. This approach mitigates the limitations of current RAG models and offers a more robust solution for handling extensive and diverse datasets. Despite leveraging a fraction of the parameters, our ICV-enhanced model achieves competitive performance against models like LLaMA-3, Gemma, and Phi-3, significantly reducing computational costs and memory requirements. ICV reduces prompt length, is easy to control, surpasses token limitations, and is computationally efficient compared to fine-tuning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are at the forefront of NLP achievements but fall short in dealing with shortcut learning, factual inconsistency, and vulnerability to adversarial inputs.These shortcomings are especially critical in medical contexts, where they can misrepresent actual model capabilities. Addressing this, we present SemEval-2024 Task 2: Safe Biomedical Natural Language Inference for ClinicalTrials. Our contributions include the refined NLI4CT-P dataset (i.e., Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trials - Perturbed), designed to challenge LLMs with interventional and causal reasoning tasks, along with a comprehensive evaluation of methods and results for participant submissions. A total of 106 participants registered for the task contributing to over 1200 individual submissions and 25 system overview papers. This initiative aims to advance the robustness and applicability of NLI models in healthcare, ensuring safer and more dependable AI assistance in clinical decision-making. We anticipate that the dataset, models, and outcomes of this task can support future research in the field of biomedical NLI. The dataset, competition leaderboard, and website are publicly available.

Chat models (i.e. language models trained to follow instructions through conversation with humans) outperform base models (i.e. trained solely on unlabeled data) in both conversation and general task-solving abilities. These models are generally English-centric and require further adaptation for languages that are underrepresented in or absent from their training data. A common technique for adapting base models is to extend the model's vocabulary with target language tokens, i.e. vocabulary expansion (VE), and then continually pre-train it on language-specific data. Using chat data is ideal for chat model adaptation, but often, either this does not exist or is costly to construct. Alternatively, adapting chat models with unlabeled data is a possible solution, but it could result in catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we investigate the impact of using unlabeled target language data for VE on chat models for the first time. We first show that off-the-shelf VE generally performs well across target language tasks and models in 71% of cases, though it underperforms in scenarios where source chat models are already strong. To further improve adapted models, we propose post-hoc techniques that inject information from the source model without requiring any further training. Experiments reveal the effectiveness of our methods, helping the adapted models to achieve performance improvements in 87% of cases.

In-Context Learning (ICL) technique based on Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained prominence in Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks for its lower computing resource consumption, less manual labeling overhead, and stronger generalizability. Nevertheless, most ICL-based NER methods depend on large-parameter LLMs: the open-source models demand substantial computational resources for deployment and inference, while the closed-source ones incur high API costs, raise data-privacy concerns, and hinder community collaboration. To address this question, we propose an Ensemble Learning Method for Named Entity Recognition (EL4NER), which aims at aggregating the ICL outputs of multiple open-source, small-parameter LLMs to enhance overall performance in NER tasks at less deployment and inference cost. Specifically, our method comprises three key components. First, we design a task decomposition-based pipeline that facilitates deep, multi-stage ensemble learning. Second, we introduce a novel span-level sentence similarity algorithm to establish an ICL demonstration retrieval mechanism better suited for NER tasks. Third, we incorporate a self-validation mechanism to mitigate the noise introduced during the ensemble process. We evaluated EL4NER on multiple widely adopted NER datasets from diverse domains. Our experimental results indicate that EL4NER surpasses most closed-source, large-parameter LLM-based methods at a lower parameter cost and even attains state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among ICL-based methods on certain datasets. These results show the parameter efficiency of EL4NER and underscore the feasibility of employing open-source, small-parameter LLMs within the ICL paradigm for NER tasks.

We investigate the usefulness of generative Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating training data for cross-encoder re-rankers in a novel direction: generating synthetic documents instead of synthetic queries. We introduce a new dataset, ChatGPT-RetrievalQA, and compare the effectiveness of models fine-tuned on LLM-generated and human-generated data. Data generated with generative LLMs can be used to augment training data, especially in domains with smaller amounts of labeled data. We build ChatGPT-RetrievalQA based on an existing dataset, human ChatGPT Comparison Corpus (HC3), consisting of public question collections with human responses and answers from ChatGPT. We fine-tune a range of cross-encoder re-rankers on either human-generated or ChatGPT-generated data. Our evaluation on MS MARCO DEV, TREC DL'19, and TREC DL'20 demonstrates that cross-encoder re-ranking models trained on ChatGPT responses are statistically significantly more effective zero-shot re-rankers than those trained on human responses. In a supervised setting, the human-trained re-rankers outperform the LLM-trained re-rankers. Our novel findings suggest that generative LLMs have high potential in generating training data for neural retrieval models. Further work is needed to determine the effect of factually wrong information in the generated responses and test our findings' generalizability with open-source LLMs. We release our data, code, and cross-encoders checkpoints for future work.

To support emerging language-based applications using dispersed and heterogeneous computing resources, the hybrid language model (HLM) offers a promising architecture, where an on-device small language model (SLM) generates draft tokens that are validated and corrected by a remote large language model (LLM). However, the original HLM suffers from substantial communication overhead, as the LLM requires the SLM to upload the full vocabulary distribution for each token. Moreover, both communication and computation resources are wasted when the LLM validates tokens that are highly likely to be accepted. To overcome these limitations, we propose communication-efficient and uncertainty-aware HLM (CU-HLM). In CU-HLM, the SLM transmits truncated vocabulary distributions only when its output uncertainty is high. We validate the feasibility of this opportunistic transmission by discovering a strong correlation between SLM's uncertainty and LLM's rejection probability. Furthermore, we theoretically derive optimal uncertainty thresholds and optimal vocabulary truncation strategies. Simulation results show that, compared to standard HLM, CU-HLM achieves up to 206times higher token throughput by skipping 74.8% transmissions with 97.4% vocabulary compression, while maintaining 97.4% accuracy.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention in the field of natural language processing (NLP) due to their wide range of applications. However, training LLMs for languages other than English poses significant challenges, due to the difficulty in acquiring large-scale corpus and the requisite computing resources. In this paper, we propose ChatFlow, a cross-language transfer-based LLM, to address these challenges and train large Chinese language models in a cost-effective manner. We employ a mix of Chinese, English, and parallel corpus to continuously train the LLaMA2 model, aiming to align cross-language representations and facilitate the knowledge transfer specifically to the Chinese language model. In addition, we use a dynamic data sampler to progressively transition the model from unsupervised pre-training to supervised fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach accelerates model convergence and achieves superior performance. We evaluate ChatFlow on popular Chinese and English benchmarks, the results indicate that it outperforms other Chinese models post-trained on LLaMA-2-7B.

Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT, have demonstrated remarkable results in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks with in-context learning, which involves inference based on a few demonstration examples. Despite their successes in NLP tasks, no investigation has been conducted to assess the ability of LLMs to perform document information extraction (DIE) using in-context learning. Applying LLMs to DIE poses two challenges: the modality and task gap. To this end, we propose a simple but effective in-context learning framework called ICL-D3IE, which enables LLMs to perform DIE with different types of demonstration examples. Specifically, we extract the most difficult and distinct segments from hard training documents as hard demonstrations for benefiting all test instances. We design demonstrations describing relationships that enable LLMs to understand positional relationships. We introduce formatting demonstrations for easy answer extraction. Additionally, the framework improves diverse demonstrations by updating them iteratively. Our experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the ICL-D3IE framework enables Davinci-003/ChatGPT to achieve superior performance when compared to previous pre-trained methods fine-tuned with full training in both the in-distribution (ID) setting and in the out-of-distribution (OOD) setting. Code is available at https://github.com/MAEHCM/ICL-D3IE.

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) represent a substantial advancement in the capabilities of large language models, notably in reducing factual hallucination by leveraging external knowledge sources. However, the reliability of the retrieved information is not always guaranteed. The retrieval of irrelevant data can lead to misguided responses, and potentially causing the model to overlook its inherent knowledge, even when it possesses adequate information to address the query. Moreover, standard RALMs often struggle to assess whether they possess adequate knowledge, both intrinsic and retrieved, to provide an accurate answer. In situations where knowledge is lacking, these systems should ideally respond with "unknown" when the answer is unattainable. In response to these challenges, we introduces Chain-of-Noting (CoN), a novel approach aimed at improving the robustness of RALMs in facing noisy, irrelevant documents and in handling unknown scenarios. The core idea of CoN is to generate sequential reading notes for retrieved documents, enabling a thorough evaluation of their relevance to the given question and integrating this information to formulate the final answer. We employed ChatGPT to create training data for CoN, which was subsequently trained on an LLaMa-2 7B model. Our experiments across four open-domain QA benchmarks show that RALMs equipped with CoN significantly outperform standard RALMs. Notably, CoN achieves an average improvement of +7.9 in EM score given entirely noisy retrieved documents and +10.5 in rejection rates for real-time questions that fall outside the pre-training knowledge scope.

Building open-domain chatbots is a challenging area for machine learning research. While prior work has shown that scaling neural models in the number of parameters and the size of the data they are trained on gives improved results, we show that other ingredients are important for a high-performing chatbot. Good conversation requires a number of skills that an expert conversationalist blends in a seamless way: providing engaging talking points and listening to their partners, and displaying knowledge, empathy and personality appropriately, while maintaining a consistent persona. We show that large scale models can learn these skills when given appropriate training data and choice of generation strategy. We build variants of these recipes with 90M, 2.7B and 9.4B parameter models, and make our models and code publicly available. Human evaluations show our best models are superior to existing approaches in multi-turn dialogue in terms of engagingness and humanness measurements. We then discuss the limitations of this work by analyzing failure cases of our models.

Open Information Extraction (OIE) task aims at extracting structured facts from unstructured text, typically in the form of (subject, relation, object) triples. Despite the potential of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT as a general task solver, they lag behind state-of-the-art (supervised) methods in OIE tasks due to two key issues. First, LLMs struggle to distinguish irrelevant context from relevant relations and generate structured output due to the restrictions on fine-tuning the model. Second, LLMs generates responses autoregressively based on probability, which makes the predicted relations lack confidence. In this paper, we assess the capabilities of LLMs in improving the OIE task. Particularly, we propose various in-context learning strategies to enhance LLM's instruction-following ability and a demonstration uncertainty quantification module to enhance the confidence of the generated relations. Our experiments on three OIE benchmark datasets show that our approach holds its own against established supervised methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

While training large language models (LLMs) from scratch can indeed lead to models with distinct capabilities and strengths, this approach incurs substantial costs and may lead to potential redundancy in competencies. An alternative strategy is to combine existing LLMs into a more robust LLM, thereby diminishing the necessity for expensive pre-training. However, due to the diverse architectures of LLMs, direct parameter blending proves to be unfeasible. Recently, FuseLLM introduced the concept of knowledge fusion to transfer the collective knowledge of multiple structurally varied LLMs into a target LLM through lightweight continual training. In this report, we extend the scalability and flexibility of the FuseLLM framework to realize the fusion of chat LLMs, resulting in FuseChat. FuseChat comprises two main stages. Firstly, we undertake knowledge fusion for structurally and scale-varied source LLMs to derive multiple target LLMs of identical structure and size via lightweight fine-tuning. Then, these target LLMs are merged within the parameter space, wherein we propose a novel method for determining the merging weights based on the variation ratio of parameter matrices before and after fine-tuning. We validate our approach using three prominent chat LLMs with diverse architectures and scales, namely NH2-Mixtral-8x7B, NH2-Solar-10.7B, and OpenChat-3.5-7B. Experimental results spanning various chat domains demonstrate the superiority of \textsc{FuseChat-7B} across a broad spectrum of chat LLMs at 7B and 34B scales, even surpassing GPT-3.5 (March) and approaching Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct. Our code, model weights, and data are openly accessible at https://github.com/fanqiwan/FuseLLM.

The computational and energy costs of Large Language Models (LLMs) have increased exponentially driven by the growing model sizes and the massive adoption of LLMs by hundreds of millions of users. The unit cost of an LLM is the computation of a token. Therefore, the tokenizer plays an important role in the efficiency of a model, and they are carefully optimized to minimize the number of tokens for the text in their training corpus. One of the most popular applications of LLMs are chatbots that interact with users. A key observation is that, for those chatbots, what is important is the performance of the tokenizer in the user text input and the chatbot responses. Those are most likely different from the text in the training corpus. So, a question that immediately arises is whether there is a potential benefit in optimizing tokenizers for chatbot conversations. In this paper, this idea is explored for different tokenizers by using a publicly available corpus of chatbot conversations to redesign their vocabularies and evaluate their performance in this domain. The results show that conversation-optimized tokenizers consistently reduce the number of tokens in chatbot dialogues, which can lead to meaningful energy savings, in the range of 5% to 10% while having minimal or even slightly positive impact on tokenization efficiency for the original training corpus.

Although LLMs continue to iterate and improve, most open-source models still have a context window of no more than 4k, limiting their ability to handle long-context problems. Most existing open-source models for long-context chat still lack satisfactory accuracy. To address this issue, I approach it from the perspective of training data and theoretically prove that training the capability to handle long contexts requires "effective" rather than "long" data. Based on this, I propose using the "original text paraphrase" task, and successfully extend the context window of the existing model to 32k by a low-cost and effective method, achieving extremely high accuracy in multi-document-QA and surpassing all existing open-source models of the same scale. The model and training data have been open-sourced on HuggingFace and WiseModel.

Large language models (LLMs) with decoder-only architectures demonstrate remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. This feature enables them to effectively handle both familiar and novel tasks by utilizing examples provided within their input context. Recognizing the potential of this capability, we propose leveraging the ICL feature in LLMs to enhance the process of text embedding generation. To this end, we introduce a novel model bge-en-icl, which employs few-shot examples to produce high-quality text embeddings. Our approach integrates task-related examples directly into the query side, resulting in significant improvements across various tasks. Additionally, we have investigated how to effectively utilize LLMs as embedding models, including various attention mechanisms, pooling methods, etc. Our findings suggest that retaining the original framework often yields the best results, underscoring that simplicity is best. Experimental results on the MTEB and AIR-Bench benchmarks demonstrate that our approach sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Our model, code and dataset are freely available at https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding .

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are foundational tools for modeling sequential data with latent Markovian structure, yet fitting them to real-world data remains computationally challenging. In this work, we show that pre-trained large language models (LLMs) can effectively model data generated by HMMs via in-context learning (ICL)x2013their ability to infer patterns from examples within a prompt. On a diverse set of synthetic HMMs, LLMs achieve predictive accuracy approaching the theoretical optimum. We uncover novel scaling trends influenced by HMM properties, and offer theoretical conjectures for these empirical observations. We also provide practical guidelines for scientists on using ICL as a diagnostic tool for complex data. On real-world animal decision-making tasks, ICL achieves competitive performance with models designed by human experts. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that ICL can learn and predict HMM-generated sequencesx2013an advance that deepens our understanding of in-context learning in LLMs and establishes its potential as a powerful tool for uncovering hidden structure in complex scientific data.

The emergence of pretrained large language models has led to the deployment of a range of social chatbots for chitchat. Although these chatbots demonstrate language ability and fluency, they are not guaranteed to be engaging and can struggle to retain users. This work investigates the development of social chatbots that prioritize user engagement to enhance retention, specifically examining the use of human feedback to efficiently develop highly engaging chatbots. The proposed approach uses automatic pseudo-labels collected from user interactions to train a reward model that can be used to reject low-scoring sample responses generated by the chatbot model at inference time. Intuitive evaluation metrics, such as mean conversation length (MCL), are introduced as proxies to measure the level of engagement of deployed chatbots. A/B testing on groups of 10,000 new daily chatbot users on the Chai Research platform shows that this approach increases the MCL by up to 70%, which translates to a more than 30% increase in user retention for a GPT-J 6B model. Future work aims to use the reward model to realise a data fly-wheel, where the latest user conversations can be used to alternately fine-tune the language model and the reward model.

Large language models (LLMs) have made impressive progress in chemistry applications, including molecular property prediction, molecular generation, experimental protocol design, etc. However, the community lacks a dialogue-based model specifically designed for chemistry. The challenge arises from the fact that most chemical data and scientific knowledge are primarily stored in structured databases, and the direct use of these structured data compromises the model's ability to maintain coherent dialogue. To tackle this issue, we develop a novel template-based instruction construction method that transforms structured knowledge into plain dialogue, making it suitable for language model training. By leveraging this approach, we develop ChemLLM, the first large language model dedicated to chemistry, capable of performing various tasks across chemical disciplines with smooth dialogue interaction. ChemLLM beats GPT-3.5 on all three principal tasks in chemistry, i.e., name conversion, molecular caption, and reaction prediction, and surpasses GPT-4 on two of them. Remarkably, ChemLLM also shows exceptional adaptability to related mathematical and physical tasks despite being trained mainly on chemical-centric corpora. Furthermore, ChemLLM demonstrates proficiency in specialized NLP tasks within chemistry, such as literature translation and cheminformatic programming. ChemLLM opens up a new avenue for exploration within chemical studies, while our method of integrating structured chemical knowledge into dialogue systems sets a new frontier for developing LLMs across various scientific fields. Codes, Datasets, and Model weights are publicly accessible at hf.co/AI4Chem/ChemLLM-7B-Chat.

In recent times, the grandeur of Large Language Models (LLMs) has not only shone in the realm of natural language processing but has also cast its brilliance across a vast array of applications. This remarkable display of LLM capabilities has ignited a surge in research contributions within this domain, spanning a diverse spectrum of topics. These contributions encompass advancements in neural network architecture, context length enhancements, model alignment, training datasets, benchmarking, efficiency improvements, and more. Recent years have witnessed a dynamic synergy between academia and industry, propelling the field of LLM research to new heights. A notable milestone in this journey is the introduction of ChatGPT, a powerful AI chatbot grounded in LLMs, which has garnered widespread societal attention. The evolving technology of LLMs has begun to reshape the landscape of the entire AI community, promising a revolutionary shift in the way we create and employ AI algorithms. Given this swift-paced technical evolution, our survey embarks on a journey to encapsulate the recent strides made in the world of LLMs. Through an exploration of the background, key discoveries, and prevailing methodologies, we offer an up-to-the-minute review of the literature. By examining multiple LLM models, our paper not only presents a comprehensive overview but also charts a course that identifies existing challenges and points toward potential future research trajectories. This survey furnishes a well-rounded perspective on the current state of generative AI, shedding light on opportunities for further exploration, enhancement, and innovation.

This study examines the performance of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) in text annotation tasks and compares it with proprietary models like ChatGPT and human-based services such as MTurk. While prior research demonstrated the high performance of ChatGPT across numerous NLP tasks, open-source LLMs like HugginChat and FLAN are gaining attention for their cost-effectiveness, transparency, reproducibility, and superior data protection. We assess these models using both zero-shot and few-shot approaches and different temperature parameters across a range of text annotation tasks. Our findings show that while ChatGPT achieves the best performance in most tasks, open-source LLMs not only outperform MTurk but also demonstrate competitive potential against ChatGPT in specific tasks.

A Conversational Recommender System (CRS) offers increased transparency and control to users by enabling them to engage with the system through a real-time multi-turn dialogue. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an unprecedented ability to converse naturally and incorporate world knowledge and common-sense reasoning into language understanding, unlocking the potential of this paradigm. However, effectively leveraging LLMs within a CRS introduces new technical challenges, including properly understanding and controlling a complex conversation and retrieving from external sources of information. These issues are exacerbated by a large, evolving item corpus and a lack of conversational data for training. In this paper, we provide a roadmap for building an end-to-end large-scale CRS using LLMs. In particular, we propose new implementations for user preference understanding, flexible dialogue management and explainable recommendations as part of an integrated architecture powered by LLMs. For improved personalization, we describe how an LLM can consume interpretable natural language user profiles and use them to modulate session-level context. To overcome conversational data limitations in the absence of an existing production CRS, we propose techniques for building a controllable LLM-based user simulator to generate synthetic conversations. As a proof of concept we introduce RecLLM, a large-scale CRS for YouTube videos built on LaMDA, and demonstrate its fluency and diverse functionality through some illustrative example conversations.

The unparalleled performance of closed-sourced ChatGPT has sparked efforts towards its democratization, with notable strides made by leveraging real user and ChatGPT conversations, as evidenced by Vicuna. However, while current endeavors like Baize and UltraChat aim to auto-generate conversational data due to challenges in gathering human participation, they primarily rely on ChatGPT to simulate human behaviors based on directives rather than genuine human learning. This results in a limited scope, diminished diversity, and an absence of genuine multi-round conversational dynamics. To address the above issues, we innovatively target human questions extracted from genuine human-machine conversations as a learning goal and train a user simulator, UserGPT, to produce a high-quality human-centric synthetic conversation dataset, RealChat. Subsequently, this dataset trains our assistant model, ReaLM. Experimentally, ReaLM outpaces baseline models in both Vicuna-Bench and MT-Bench by pairwise comparison when considering equivalent training set sizes, and manual evaluation also shows that our model is highly competitive. Impressively, when fine-tuned with the latest LLaMA 2 model, ReaLM secured a leading score of 6.33 in the MT-Bench, outshining the contemporary same-scale models, including the LLaMA-2-7B-chat model. Further in-depth analysis demonstrates the scalability and transferability of our approach. A preliminary exploration into the interplay between training set data quality and resultant model performance is also undertaken, laying a robust groundwork for future investigations. The code is available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/ReaLM.

This study presents an innovative enhancement to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems by seamlessly integrating fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) with vector databases. This integration capitalizes on the combined strengths of structured data retrieval and the nuanced comprehension provided by advanced LLMs. Central to our approach are the LoRA and QLoRA methodologies, which stand at the forefront of model refinement through parameter-efficient fine-tuning and memory optimization. A novel feature of our research is the incorporation of user feedback directly into the training process, ensuring the model's continuous adaptation to user expectations and thus, improving its performance and applicability. Additionally, we introduce a Quantized Influence Measure (QIM) as an innovative "AI Judge" mechanism to enhance the precision of result selection, further refining the system's accuracy. Accompanied by an executive diagram and a detailed algorithm for fine-tuning QLoRA, our work provides a comprehensive framework for implementing these advancements within chatbot technologies. This research contributes significant insights into LLM optimization for specific uses and heralds new directions for further development in retrieval-augmented models. Through extensive experimentation and analysis, our findings lay a robust foundation for future advancements in chatbot technology and retrieval systems, marking a significant step forward in the creation of more sophisticated, precise, and user-centric conversational AI systems.

We aim to produce a smaller language model that is aligned to user intent. Previous research has shown that applying distilled supervised fine-tuning (dSFT) on larger models significantly improves task accuracy; however, these models are unaligned, i.e. they do not respond well to natural prompts. To distill this property, we experiment with the use of preference data from AI Feedback (AIF). Starting from a dataset of outputs ranked by a teacher model, we apply distilled direct preference optimization (dDPO) to learn a chat model with significantly improved intent alignment. The approach requires only a few hours of training without any additional sampling during fine-tuning. The final result, Zephyr-7B, sets the state-of-the-art on chat benchmarks for 7B parameter models, and requires no human annotation. In particular, results on MT-Bench show that Zephyr-7B surpasses Llama2-Chat-70B, the best open-access RLHF-based model. Code, models, data, and tutorials for the system are available at https://github.com/huggingface/alignment-handbook.

Recent large language models (LLMs) in the general domain, such as ChatGPT, have shown remarkable success in following instructions and producing human-like responses. However, such language models have not been learned individually and carefully for the medical domain, resulting in poor diagnostic accuracy and inability to give correct recommendations for medical diagnosis, medications, etc. To address this issue, we collected more than 700 diseases and their corresponding symptoms, recommended medications, and required medical tests, and then generated 5K doctor-patient conversations. By fine-tuning models of doctor-patient conversations, these models emerge with great potential to understand patients' needs, provide informed advice, and offer valuable assistance in a variety of medical-related fields. The integration of these advanced language models into healthcare can revolutionize the way healthcare professionals and patients communicate, ultimately improving the overall quality of care and patient outcomes. In addition, we will open all source code, datasets and model weights to advance the further development of dialogue models in the medical field. In addition, the training data, code, and weights of this project are available at: https://github.com/Kent0n-Li/ChatDoctor.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a groundbreaking technology and their unparalleled text generation capabilities have sparked interest in their application to the fundamental sentence representation learning task. Existing methods have explored utilizing LLMs as data annotators to generate synthesized data for training contrastive learning based sentence embedding models such as SimCSE. However, since contrastive learning models are sensitive to the quality of sentence pairs, the effectiveness of these methods is largely influenced by the content generated from LLMs, highlighting the need for more refined generation in the context of sentence representation learning. Building upon this premise, we propose MultiCSR, a multi-level contrastive sentence representation learning framework that decomposes the process of prompting LLMs to generate a corpus for training base sentence embedding models into three stages (i.e., sentence generation, sentence pair construction, in-batch training) and refines the generated content at these three distinct stages, ensuring only high-quality sentence pairs are utilized to train a base contrastive learning model. Our extensive experiments reveal that MultiCSR enables a less advanced LLM to surpass the performance of ChatGPT, while applying it to ChatGPT achieves better state-of-the-art results. Comprehensive analyses further underscore the potential of our framework in various application scenarios and achieving better sentence representation learning with LLMs.

As the issue of global climate change becomes increasingly severe, the demand for research in climate science continues to grow. Natural language processing technologies, represented by Large Language Models (LLMs), have been widely applied to climate change-specific research, providing essential information support for decision-makers and the public. Some studies have improved model performance on relevant tasks by constructing climate change-related instruction data and instruction-tuning LLMs. However, current research remains inadequate in efficiently producing large volumes of high-precision instruction data for climate change, which limits further development of climate change LLMs. This study introduces an automated method for constructing instruction data. The method generates instructions using facts and background knowledge from documents and enhances the diversity of the instruction data through web scraping and the collection of seed instructions. Using this method, we constructed a climate change instruction dataset, named ClimateChat-Corpus, which was used to fine-tune open-source LLMs, resulting in an LLM named ClimateChat. Evaluation results show that ClimateChat significantly improves performance on climate change question-and-answer tasks. Additionally, we evaluated the impact of different base models and instruction data on LLM performance and demonstrated its capability to adapt to a wide range of climate change scientific discovery tasks, emphasizing the importance of selecting an appropriate base model for instruction tuning. This research provides valuable references and empirical support for constructing climate change instruction data and training climate change-specific LLMs.

With the increasing ability of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has become a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions only based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It has been a new trend to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of LLMs. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress and challenges of ICL. We first present a formal definition of ICL and clarify its correlation to related studies. Then, we organize and discuss advanced techniques, including training strategies, demonstration designing strategies, as well as related analysis. Finally, we discuss the challenges of ICL and provide potential directions for further research. We hope that our work can encourage more research on uncovering how ICL works and improving ICL.

Learning high-quality text representations is fundamental to a wide range of NLP tasks. While encoder pretraining has traditionally relied on Masked Language Modeling (MLM), recent evidence suggests that decoder models pretrained with Causal Language Modeling (CLM) can be effectively repurposed as encoders, often surpassing traditional encoders on text representation benchmarks. However, it remains unclear whether these gains reflect an inherent advantage of the CLM objective or arise from confounding factors such as model and data scale. In this paper, we address this question through a series of large-scale, carefully controlled pretraining ablations, training a total of 30 models ranging from 210 million to 1 billion parameters, and conducting over 15,000 fine-tuning and evaluation runs. We find that while training with MLM generally yields better performance across text representation tasks, CLM-trained models are more data-efficient and demonstrate improved fine-tuning stability. Building on these findings, we experimentally show that a biphasic training strategy that sequentially applies CLM and then MLM, achieves optimal performance under a fixed computational training budget. Moreover, we demonstrate that this strategy becomes more appealing when initializing from readily available pretrained CLM models (from the existing LLM ecosystem), reducing the computational burden needed to train best-in-class encoder models. We release all project artifacts at https://hf.co/MLMvsCLM to foster further research.

Conversational Search (CS) is the task of retrieving relevant documents from a corpus within a conversational context, combining retrieval with conversational context modeling. With the explosion of Large Language Models (LLMs), the CS field has seen major improvements with LLMs rewriting user queries, accounting for conversational context. However, engaging LLMs at inference time harms efficiency. Current methods address this by distilling embeddings from human-rewritten queries to learn the context modeling task. Yet, these approaches predominantly focus on context modeling, and only treat the contrastive component of the retrieval task within a distillation-independent loss term. To address these limitations, we propose a new distillation method, as a relaxation of the previous objective, unifying retrieval and context modeling. We relax the existing training objectives by distilling similarity scores between conversations and documents, rather than relying solely on representation learning. Our proposed distillation objective allows for more freedom in the representation space and leverages the contrastive nature of document relevance. Through experiments on Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) across 5 CS datasets, our approach demonstrates substantial improvements in both in-domain and out-of-domain retrieval performance, outperforming state-of-the-art with gains of up to 6 points in recall for out-of-domain datasets. Additionally, through the relaxation of the objective, we propose a multi-teacher distillation, using multiple LLMs as teachers, yielding additional gains, and outperforming the teachers themselves in in-domain experiments. Finally, analysis of the sparsity of the models reveals that our distillation allows for better control over the sparsity of the trained models.

We propose MemoChat, a pipeline for refining instructions that enables large language models (LLMs) to effectively employ self-composed memos for maintaining consistent long-range open-domain conversations. We demonstrate a long-range open-domain conversation through iterative "memorization-retrieval-response" cycles. This requires us to carefully design tailored tuning instructions for each distinct stage. The instructions are reconstructed from a collection of public datasets to teach the LLMs to memorize and retrieve past dialogues with structured memos, leading to enhanced consistency when participating in future conversations. We invite experts to manually annotate a test set designed to evaluate the consistency of long-range conversations questions. Experiments on three testing scenarios involving both open-source and API-accessible chatbots at scale verify the efficacy of MemoChat, which outperforms strong baselines. Our codes, data and models are available here: https://github.com/LuJunru/MemoChat.

The recent progress of large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT and GPT-4, in comprehending and responding to human instructions has been remarkable. Nevertheless, these models typically perform better in English and have not been explicitly trained for the medical domain, resulting in suboptimal precision in diagnoses, drug recommendations, and other medical advice. Additionally, training and deploying a dialogue model is still believed to be impossible for hospitals, hindering the promotion of LLMs. To tackle these challenges, we have collected databases of medical dialogues in Chinese with ChatGPT's help and adopted several techniques to train an easy-deploy LLM. Remarkably, we were able to fine-tune the ChatGLM-6B on a single A100 80G in 13 hours, which means having a healthcare-purpose LLM can be very affordable. DoctorGLM is currently an early-stage engineering attempt and contain various mistakes. We are sharing it with the broader community to invite feedback and suggestions to improve its healthcare-focused capabilities: https://github.com/xionghonglin/DoctorGLM.

This paper explores the use of open generative Large Language Models (LLMs) for annotation tasks in the social sciences. The study highlights the challenges associated with proprietary models, such as limited reproducibility and privacy concerns, and advocates for the adoption of open (source) models that can be operated on independent devices. Two examples of annotation tasks, sentiment analysis in tweets and identification of leisure activities in childhood aspirational essays are provided. The study evaluates the performance of different prompting strategies and models (neural-chat-7b-v3-2, Starling-LM-7B-alpha, openchat_3.5, zephyr-7b-alpha and zephyr-7b-beta). The results indicate the need for careful validation and tailored prompt engineering. The study highlights the advantages of open models for data privacy and reproducibility.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are distinguished by their architecture, which dictates their parameter size and performance capabilities. Social scientists have increasingly adopted LLMs for text classification tasks, which are difficult to scale with human coders. While very large, closed-source models often deliver superior performance, their use presents significant risks. These include lack of transparency, potential exposure of sensitive data, challenges to replicability, and dependence on proprietary systems. Additionally, their high costs make them impractical for large-scale research projects. In contrast, open-source models, although available in various sizes, may underperform compared to commercial alternatives if used without further fine-tuning. However, open-source models offer distinct advantages: they can be run locally (ensuring data privacy), fine-tuned for specific tasks, shared within the research community, and integrated into reproducible workflows. This study demonstrates that small, fine-tuned open-source LLMs can achieve equal or superior performance to models such as ChatGPT-4. We further explore the relationship between training set size and fine-tuning efficacy in open-source models. Finally, we propose a hybrid workflow that leverages the strengths of both open and closed models, offering a balanced approach to performance, transparency, and reproducibility.

Fine-tuning on instruction data has been widely validated as an effective practice for implementing chat language models like ChatGPT. Scaling the diversity and quality of such data, although straightforward, stands a great chance of leading to improved performance. This paper aims to improve the upper bound of open-source models further. We first provide a systematically designed, diverse, informative, large-scale dataset of instructional conversations, UltraChat, which does not involve human queries. Our objective is to capture the breadth of interactions that a human might have with an AI assistant and employs a comprehensive framework to generate multi-turn conversation iteratively. UltraChat contains 1.5 million high-quality multi-turn dialogues and covers a wide range of topics and instructions. Our statistical analysis of UltraChat reveals its superiority in various key metrics, including scale, average length, diversity, coherence, etc., solidifying its position as a leading open-source dataset. Building upon UltraChat, we fine-tune a LLaMA model to create a powerful conversational model, UltraLLaMA. Our evaluations indicate that UltraLLaMA consistently outperforms other open-source models, including Vicuna, the previously recognized state-of-the-art open-source model. The dataset and the model will be publicly released\url{https://github.com/thunlp/UltraChat}.

Interacting with human via high-quality multi-turn dialogues is a key feature of large language models (LLMs). However, human-based evaluation of such capability involves intensive manual labor. This report provides a preliminary evaluation of existing large language models for human-style multi-turn chatting, through an LLM-based approach. We start from real-world human dialogues and keep the very first utterances as the ChatSEED. Then we prompt LLMs to generate a full multi-turn dialogue (tens of utterances) based on the ChatSEED, utterance by utterance. Finally, we adopt state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-4, \etc) as the judge to evaluate the generated dialogues. With different evaluation protocols, we come to substantially identical conclusions. We find that GPT-4 can generate human-style multi-turn dialogues with impressive quality, significantly outperforms its counterparts. It's difficult for a discriminator to distinguish between GPT-4 generated dialogues and human dialogues. In contrast, other LLMs struggle to generate multi-turn dialogues of satisfactory quality due to poor instruction-following capability, tendency to generate lengthy utterances, or limited general capability. All data and codes will be provided in https://github.com/open-compass/BotChat/ and we hope they can serve as a valuable resource for evaluating multi-turn chatting capabilities of LLMs.

The scarcity of non-English data limits the development of non-English large language models (LLMs). Transforming English-centric LLMs to non-English has been identified as an effective and resource-efficient method. Previous works start from base LLMs and perform knowledge distillation (KD) with data generated by stronger LLMs, e.g. GPT-4. Compared to base LLMs, chat LLMs are further optimized for advanced abilities, e.g. multi-turn conversation and human preference alignment, and thus more powerful in both helpfulness and safety. However, transforming a chat LLM involves two critical issues: (1) How can we effectively transfer advanced abilities without their supervised data? (2) How can we prevent the original knowledge from catastrophic forgetting during transformation? We target these issues by introducing a simple framework called TransLLM. For the first issue, TransLLM divides the transfer problem into some common sub-tasks with the translation chain-of-thought, which uses the translation as the bridge between English and non-English step-by-step. We further enhance the performance of sub-tasks with publicly available data. For the second issue, we propose a method comprising two synergistic components: low-rank adaptation for training to maintain the original LLM parameters, and recovery KD, which utilizes data generated by the chat LLM itself to recover the original knowledge from the frozen parameters. In the experiments, we transform the LLaMA-2-chat-7B to the Thai language. Our method, using only single-turn data, outperforms strong baselines and ChatGPT on multi-turn benchmark MT-bench. Furthermore, our method, without safety data, rejects more harmful queries of safety benchmark AdvBench than both ChatGPT and GPT-4.

This paper presents ChatCounselor, a large language model (LLM) solution designed to provide mental health support. Unlike generic chatbots, ChatCounselor is distinguished by its foundation in real conversations between consulting clients and professional psychologists, enabling it to possess specialized knowledge and counseling skills in the field of psychology. The training dataset, Psych8k, was constructed from 260 in-depth interviews, each spanning an hour. To assess the quality of counseling responses, the counseling Bench was devised. Leveraging GPT-4 and meticulously crafted prompts based on seven metrics of psychological counseling assessment, the model underwent evaluation using a set of real-world counseling questions. Impressively, ChatCounselor surpasses existing open-source models in the counseling Bench and approaches the performance level of ChatGPT, showcasing the remarkable enhancement in model capability attained through high-quality domain-specific data.

The success of ChatGPT has ignited an AI race, with researchers striving to develop new large language models (LLMs) that can match or surpass the language understanding and generation abilities of commercial ones. In recent times, a number of models have emerged, claiming performance near that of GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 through various instruction-tuning methods. As practitioners of Text-to-SQL parsing, we are grateful for their valuable contributions to open-source research. However, it is important to approach these claims with a sense of scrutiny and ascertain the actual effectiveness of these models. Therefore, we pit six popular large language models against each other, systematically evaluating their Text-to-SQL parsing capability on nine benchmark datasets with five different prompting strategies, covering both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Regrettably, the open-sourced models fell significantly short of the performance achieved by closed-source models like GPT-3.5, highlighting the need for further work to bridge the performance gap between these models.

Recently, significant public efforts have been directed towards developing low-cost models with capabilities akin to ChatGPT, thereby fostering the growth of open-source conversational models. However, there remains a scarcity of comprehensive and in-depth evaluations of these models' performance. In this study, we examine the influence of training data factors, including quantity, quality, and linguistic distribution, on model performance. Our analysis is grounded in several publicly accessible, high-quality instruction datasets, as well as our own Chinese multi-turn conversations. We assess various models using a evaluation set of 1,000 samples, encompassing nine real-world scenarios. Our goal is to supplement manual evaluations with quantitative analyses, offering valuable insights for the continued advancement of open-source chat models. Furthermore, to enhance the performance and training and inference efficiency of models in the Chinese domain, we extend the vocabulary of LLaMA - the model with the closest open-source performance to proprietary language models like GPT-3 - and conduct secondary pre-training on 3.4B Chinese words. We make our model, data, as well as code publicly available.

Paraphrasing of offensive content is a better alternative to content removal and helps improve civility in a communication environment. Supervised paraphrasers; however, rely heavily on large quantities of labelled data to help preserve meaning and intent. They also retain a large portion of the offensiveness of the original content, which raises questions on their overall usability. In this paper we aim to assist practitioners in developing usable paraphrasers by exploring In-Context Learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs), i.e., using a limited number of input-label demonstration pairs to guide the model in generating desired outputs for specific queries. Our study focuses on key factors such as -- number and order of demonstrations, exclusion of prompt instruction, and reduction in measured toxicity. We perform principled evaluation on three datasets, including our proposed Context-Aware Polite Paraphrase dataset, comprising of dialogue-style rude utterances, polite paraphrases, and additional dialogue context. We evaluate our approach using two closed source and one open source LLM. Our results reveal that ICL is comparable to supervised methods in generation quality, while being qualitatively better by 25% on human evaluation and attaining lower toxicity by 76%. Also, ICL-based paraphrasers only show a slight reduction in performance even with just 10% training data.

Annotated data plays a critical role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in training models and evaluating their performance. Given recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), models such as ChatGPT demonstrate zero-shot capability on many text-annotation tasks, comparable with or even exceeding human annotators. Such LLMs can serve as alternatives for manual annotation, due to lower costs and higher scalability. However, limited work has leveraged LLMs as complementary annotators, nor explored how annotation work is best allocated among humans and LLMs to achieve both quality and cost objectives. We propose CoAnnotating, a novel paradigm for Human-LLM co-annotation of unstructured texts at scale. Under this framework, we utilize uncertainty to estimate LLMs' annotation capability. Our empirical study shows CoAnnotating to be an effective means to allocate work from results on different datasets, with up to 21% performance improvement over random baseline. For code implementation, see https://github.com/SALT-NLP/CoAnnotating.

Collecting human-chatbot dialogues typically demands substantial manual effort and is time-consuming, which limits and poses challenges for research on conversational AI. In this work, we propose DialogueForge - a framework for generating AI-simulated conversations in human-chatbot style. To initialize each generated conversation, DialogueForge uses seed prompts extracted from real human-chatbot interactions. We test a variety of LLMs to simulate the human chatbot user, ranging from state-of-the-art proprietary models to small-scale open-source LLMs, and generate multi-turn dialogues tailored to specific tasks. In addition, we explore fine-tuning techniques to enhance the ability of smaller models to produce indistinguishable human-like dialogues. We evaluate the quality of the simulated conversations and compare different models using the UniEval and GTEval evaluation protocols. Our experiments show that large proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) generally outperform others in generating more realistic dialogues, while smaller open-source models (e.g., Llama, Mistral) offer promising performance with greater customization. We demonstrate that the performance of smaller models can be significantly improved by employing supervised fine-tuning techniques. Nevertheless, maintaining coherent and natural long-form human-like dialogues remains a common challenge across all models.

Assessing the capabilities and limitations of large language models (LLMs) has garnered significant interest, yet the evaluation of multiple models in real-world scenarios remains rare. Multilingual evaluation often relies on translated benchmarks, which typically do not capture linguistic and cultural nuances present in the source language. This study provides an extensive assessment of 24 LLMs on real world data collected from Indian patients interacting with a medical chatbot in Indian English and 4 other Indic languages. We employ a uniform Retrieval Augmented Generation framework to generate responses, which are evaluated using both automated techniques and human evaluators on four specific metrics relevant to our application. We find that models vary significantly in their performance and that instruction tuned Indic models do not always perform well on Indic language queries. Further, we empirically show that factual correctness is generally lower for responses to Indic queries compared to English queries. Finally, our qualitative work shows that code-mixed and culturally relevant queries in our dataset pose challenges to evaluated models.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated significant proficiency in solving a wide range of general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Researchers have observed a direct correlation between the performance of these models and their sizes. As a result, the sizes of these models have notably expanded in recent years, persuading researchers to adopt the term large language models (LLMs) to characterize the larger-sized PLMs. The size expansion comes with a distinct capability called in-context learning (ICL), which represents a special form of prompting and allows the models to be utilized through the presentation of demonstration examples without modifications to the model parameters. Although interesting, privacy concerns have become a major obstacle in its widespread usage. Multiple studies have examined the privacy risks linked to ICL and prompting in general, and have devised techniques to alleviate these risks. Thus, there is a necessity to organize these mitigation techniques for the benefit of the community. This survey provides a systematic overview of the privacy protection methods employed during ICL and prompting in general. We review, analyze, and compare different methods under this paradigm. Furthermore, we provide a summary of the resources accessible for the development of these frameworks. Finally, we discuss the limitations of these frameworks and offer a detailed examination of the promising areas that necessitate further exploration.

In-context Learning (ICL) is one of the key methods for enhancing the performance of large language models on specific tasks by providing a set of few-shot examples. However, the ICL capability of different types of models shows significant variation due to factors such as model architecture, volume of learning data, and the size of parameters. Generally, the larger the model's parameter size and the more extensive the learning data, the stronger its ICL capability. In this paper, we propose a method SLEICL that involves learning from examples using strong language models and then summarizing and transferring these learned skills to weak language models for inference and application. This ensures the stability and effectiveness of ICL. Compared to directly enabling weak language models to learn from prompt examples, SLEICL reduces the difficulty of ICL for these models. Our experiments, conducted on up to eight datasets with five language models, demonstrate that weak language models achieve consistent improvement over their own zero-shot or few-shot capabilities using the SLEICL method. Some weak language models even surpass the performance of GPT4-1106-preview (zero-shot) with the aid of SLEICL.

Impressive progress has been made on chat models based on Large Language Models (LLMs) recently; however, there is a noticeable lag in multi-turn conversations between open-source chat models (e.g., Alpaca and Vicuna) and the leading chat models (e.g., ChatGPT and GPT-4). Through a series of analyses, we attribute the lag to the lack of enough high-quality multi-turn instruction-tuning data. The available instruction-tuning data for the community are either single-turn conversations or multi-turn ones with certain issues, such as non-human-like instructions, less detailed responses, or rare topic shifts. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing Parrot, a highly scalable solution designed to automatically generate high-quality instruction-tuning data, which are then used to enhance the effectiveness of chat models in multi-turn conversations. Specifically, we start by training the Parrot-Ask model, which is designed to emulate real users in generating instructions. We then utilize Parrot-Ask to engage in multi-turn conversations with ChatGPT across a diverse range of topics, resulting in a collection of 40K high-quality multi-turn dialogues (Parrot-40K). These data are subsequently employed to train a chat model that we have named Parrot-Chat. We demonstrate that the dialogues gathered from Parrot-Ask markedly outperform existing multi-turn instruction-following datasets in critical metrics, including topic diversity, number of turns, and resemblance to human conversation. With only 40K training examples, Parrot-Chat achieves strong performance against other 13B open-source models across a range of instruction-following benchmarks, and particularly excels in evaluations of multi-turn capabilities. We make all codes, datasets, and two versions of the Parrot-Ask model based on LLaMA2-13B and KuaiYii-13B available at https://github.com/kwai/KwaiYii/Parrot.

We present H2O-Danube-1.8B, a 1.8B language model trained on 1T tokens following the core principles of LLama 2 and Mistral. We leverage and refine various techniques for pre-training large language models. Although our model is trained on significantly fewer total tokens compared to reference models of similar size, it exhibits highly competitive metrics across a multitude of benchmarks. We additionally release a chat model trained with supervised fine-tuning followed by direct preference optimization. We make H2O-Danube-1.8B openly available under Apache 2.0 license further democratizing LLMs to a wider audience economically.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to proactively elicit user preference and recommend high-quality items through natural language conversations. Typically, a CRS consists of a recommendation module to predict preferred items for users and a conversation module to generate appropriate responses. To develop an effective CRS, it is essential to seamlessly integrate the two modules. Existing works either design semantic alignment strategies, or share knowledge resources and representations between the two modules. However, these approaches still rely on different architectures or techniques to develop the two modules, making it difficult for effective module integration. To address this problem, we propose a unified CRS model named UniCRS based on knowledge-enhanced prompt learning. Our approach unifies the recommendation and conversation subtasks into the prompt learning paradigm, and utilizes knowledge-enhanced prompts based on a fixed pre-trained language model (PLM) to fulfill both subtasks in a unified approach. In the prompt design, we include fused knowledge representations, task-specific soft tokens, and the dialogue context, which can provide sufficient contextual information to adapt the PLM for the CRS task. Besides, for the recommendation subtask, we also incorporate the generated response template as an important part of the prompt, to enhance the information interaction between the two subtasks. Extensive experiments on two public CRS datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) rapidly evolve, their influence in science is becoming increasingly prominent. The emerging capabilities of LLMs in task generalization and free-form dialogue can significantly advance fields like chemistry and biology. However, the field of single-cell biology, which forms the foundational building blocks of living organisms, still faces several challenges. High knowledge barriers and limited scalability in current methods restrict the full exploitation of LLMs in mastering single-cell data, impeding direct accessibility and rapid iteration. To this end, we introduce ChatCell, which signifies a paradigm shift by facilitating single-cell analysis with natural language. Leveraging vocabulary adaptation and unified sequence generation, ChatCell has acquired profound expertise in single-cell biology and the capability to accommodate a diverse range of analysis tasks. Extensive experiments further demonstrate ChatCell's robust performance and potential to deepen single-cell insights, paving the way for more accessible and intuitive exploration in this pivotal field. Our project homepage is available at https://zjunlp.github.io/project/ChatCell.

While training large language models (LLMs) from scratch can indeed lead to models with distinct capabilities and strengths, it incurs substantial costs and may lead to redundancy in competencies. Knowledge fusion aims to integrate existing LLMs of diverse architectures and capabilities into a more potent LLM through lightweight continual training, thereby reducing the need for costly LLM development. In this work, we propose a new framework for the knowledge fusion of chat LLMs through two main stages, resulting in FuseChat. Firstly, we conduct pairwise knowledge fusion on source chat LLMs of varying structures and scales to create multiple target LLMs with identical structure and size via lightweight fine-tuning. During this process, a statistics-based token alignment approach is introduced as the cornerstone for fusing LLMs with different structures. Secondly, we merge these target LLMs within the parameter space, where we propose a novel method for determining the merging coefficients based on the magnitude of parameter updates before and after fine-tuning. We implement and validate FuseChat using six prominent chat LLMs with diverse architectures and scales, including OpenChat-3.5-7B, Starling-LM-7B-alpha, NH2-SOLAR-10.7B, InternLM2-Chat-20B, Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct, and Qwen-1.5-Chat-72B. Experimental results on two instruction-following benchmarks, AlpacaEval 2.0 and MT-Bench, demonstrate the superiority of FuseChat-7B over baselines of various sizes. Our model is even comparable to the larger Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct and approaches GPT-3.5-Turbo-1106 on MT-Bench. Our code, model weights, and data are public at https://github.com/fanqiwan/FuseAI.

In-context learning (ICL) facilitates large language models (LLMs) exhibiting spectacular emergent capabilities in various scenarios. Unfortunately, introducing demonstrations easily makes the prompt length explode, bringing a significant burden to hardware. In addition, random demonstrations usually achieve limited improvements in ICL, necessitating demonstration selection among accessible candidates. Previous studies introduce extra modules to perform demonstration compression or selection independently. In this paper, we propose an ICL framework UniICL, which Unifies demonstration selection and compression, and final response generation via a single frozen LLM. Specifically, UniICL first projects actual demonstrations and inference text inputs into short virtual tokens, respectively. Then, virtual tokens are applied to select suitable demonstrations by measuring semantic similarity within latent space among candidate demonstrations and inference input. Finally, inference text inputs together with selected virtual demonstrations are fed into the same frozen LLM for response generation. Notably, UniICL is a parameter-efficient framework that only contains 17M trainable parameters originating from the projection layer. We conduct experiments and analysis over in- and out-domain datasets of both generative and understanding tasks, encompassing ICL scenarios with plentiful and limited demonstration candidates. Results show that UniICL effectively unifies 12 times compression, demonstration selection, and response generation, efficiently scaling up the baseline from 4-shot to 64-shot ICL in IMDb with 24 GB CUDA allocation

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have attracted great attention given their surprising performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. Length controlled generation of LLMs emerges as an important topic, which enables users to fully leverage the capability of LLMs in more real-world scenarios like generating a proper answer or essay of a desired length. In addition, the autoregressive generation in LLMs is extremely time-consuming, while the ability of controlling this generated length can reduce the inference cost by limiting the length. Therefore, we propose a prompt-based length control method to achieve high-accuracy length controlled generation. In particular, we adopt reinforcement learning with the reward signal given by either trainable or rule-based reward models, which further enhances the length-control ability of LLMs by rewarding outputs that follows pre-defined control instruction. To enable rule-based inference, we also introduce standard prompt extractor to collect the standard control information from users' input. Experiments show that our method significantly improves the accuracy of prompt-based length control for summarization task on popular datasets like CNNDM and NYT. Both the standard prompt extractor and the RL-tuned model have show strong generalization ability to unseen control prompt templates.

This work introduces Salamandra, a suite of open-source decoder-only large language models available in three different sizes: 2, 7, and 40 billion parameters. The models were trained from scratch on highly multilingual data that comprises text in 35 European languages and code. Our carefully curated corpus is made exclusively from open-access data compiled from a wide variety of sources. Along with the base models, supplementary checkpoints that were fine-tuned on public-domain instruction data are also released for chat applications. Additionally, we also share our preliminary experiments on multimodality, which serve as proof-of-concept to showcase potential applications for the Salamandra family. Our extensive evaluations on multilingual benchmarks reveal that Salamandra has strong capabilities, achieving competitive performance when compared to similarly sized open-source models. We provide comprehensive evaluation results both on standard downstream tasks as well as key aspects related to bias and safety.With this technical report, we intend to promote open science by sharing all the details behind our design choices, data curation strategy and evaluation methodology. In addition to that, we deviate from the usual practice by making our training and evaluation scripts publicly accessible. We release all models under a permissive Apache 2.0 license in order to foster future research and facilitate commercial use, thereby contributing to the open-source ecosystem of large language models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have drawn a lot of attention due to their strong performance on a wide range of natural language tasks, since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. LLMs' ability of general-purpose language understanding and generation is acquired by training billions of model's parameters on massive amounts of text data, as predicted by scaling laws kaplan2020scaling,hoffmann2022training. The research area of LLMs, while very recent, is evolving rapidly in many different ways. In this paper, we review some of the most prominent LLMs, including three popular LLM families (GPT, LLaMA, PaLM), and discuss their characteristics, contributions and limitations. We also give an overview of techniques developed to build, and augment LLMs. We then survey popular datasets prepared for LLM training, fine-tuning, and evaluation, review widely used LLM evaluation metrics, and compare the performance of several popular LLMs on a set of representative benchmarks. Finally, we conclude the paper by discussing open challenges and future research directions.

Currently available grammatical error correction (GEC) datasets are compiled using well-formed written text, limiting the applicability of these datasets to other domains such as informal writing and dialog. In this paper, we present a novel parallel GEC dataset drawn from open-domain chatbot conversations; this dataset is, to our knowledge, the first GEC dataset targeted to a conversational setting. To demonstrate the utility of the dataset, we use our annotated data to fine-tune a state-of-the-art GEC model, resulting in a 16 point increase in model precision. This is of particular importance in a GEC model, as model precision is considered more important than recall in GEC tasks since false positives could lead to serious confusion in language learners. We also present a detailed annotation scheme which ranks errors by perceived impact on comprehensibility, making our dataset both reproducible and extensible. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our data in improving GEC model performance in conversational scenario.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, CoPilot, and Gemini have been widely adopted in different areas. As the use of LLMs continues to grow, many efforts have focused on reducing the massive training overheads of these models. But it is the environmental impact of handling user requests to LLMs that is increasingly becoming a concern. Recent studies estimate that the costs of operating LLMs in their inference phase can exceed training costs by 25x per year. As LLMs are queried incessantly, the cumulative carbon footprint for the operational phase has been shown to far exceed the footprint during the training phase. Further, estimates indicate that 500 ml of fresh water is expended for every 20-50 requests to LLMs during inference. To address these important sustainability issues with LLMs, we propose a novel framework called SLIT to co-optimize LLM quality of service (time-to-first token), carbon emissions, water usage, and energy costs. The framework utilizes a machine learning (ML) based metaheuristic to enhance the sustainability of LLM hosting across geo-distributed cloud datacenters. Such a framework will become increasingly vital as LLMs proliferate.

Human-model conversations provide a window into users' real-world scenarios, behavior, and needs, and thus are a valuable resource for model development and research. While for-profit companies collect user data through the APIs of their models, using it internally to improve their own models, the open source and research community lags behind. We introduce the ShareLM collection, a unified set of human conversations with large language models, and its accompanying plugin, a Web extension for voluntarily contributing user-model conversations. Where few platforms share their chats, the ShareLM plugin adds this functionality, thus, allowing users to share conversations from most platforms. The plugin allows the user to rate their conversations, both at the conversation and the response levels, and delete conversations they prefer to keep private before they ever leave the user's local storage. We release the plugin conversations as part of the ShareLM collection, and call for more community effort in the field of open human-model data. The code, plugin, and data are available.

Conversational search provides a natural interface for information retrieval (IR). Recent approaches have demonstrated promising results in applying dense retrieval to conversational IR. However, training dense retrievers requires large amounts of in-domain paired data. This hinders the development of conversational dense retrievers, as abundant in-domain conversations are expensive to collect. In this paper, we propose CONVERSER, a framework for training conversational dense retrievers with at most 6 examples of in-domain dialogues. Specifically, we utilize the in-context learning capability of large language models to generate conversational queries given a passage in the retrieval corpus. Experimental results on conversational retrieval benchmarks OR-QuAC and TREC CAsT 19 show that the proposed CONVERSER achieves comparable performance to fully-supervised models, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed framework in few-shot conversational dense retrieval. All source code and generated datasets are available at https://github.com/MiuLab/CONVERSER

Nowadays, open-source large language models like LLaMA have emerged. Recent developments have incorporated supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT) to align these models with human goals. However, SFT methods treat all training data with mixed quality equally, while RLFT methods require high-quality pairwise or ranking-based preference data. In this study, we present a novel framework, named OpenChat, to advance open-source language models with mixed-quality data. Specifically, we consider the general SFT training data, consisting of a small amount of expert data mixed with a large proportion of sub-optimal data, without any preference labels. We propose the C(onditioned)-RLFT, which regards different data sources as coarse-grained reward labels and learns a class-conditioned policy to leverage complementary data quality information. Interestingly, the optimal policy in C-RLFT can be easily solved through single-stage, RL-free supervised learning, which is lightweight and avoids costly human preference labeling. Through extensive experiments on three standard benchmarks, our openchat-13b fine-tuned with C-RLFT achieves the highest average performance among all 13b open-source language models. Moreover, we use AGIEval to validate the model generalization performance, in which only openchat-13b surpasses the base model. Finally, we conduct a series of analyses to shed light on the effectiveness and robustness of OpenChat. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/imoneoi/openchat.

We propose SPARC, a lightweight continual learning framework for large language models (LLMs) that enables efficient task adaptation through prompt tuning in a lower-dimensional space. By leveraging principal component analysis (PCA), we identify a compact subspace of the training data. Optimizing prompts in this lower-dimensional space enhances training efficiency, as it focuses updates on the most relevant features while reducing computational overhead. Furthermore, since the model's internal structure remains unaltered, the extensive knowledge gained from pretraining is fully preserved, ensuring that previously learned information is not compromised during adaptation. Our method achieves high knowledge retention in both task-incremental and domain-incremental continual learning setups while fine-tuning only 0.04% of the model's parameters. Additionally, by integrating LoRA, we enhance adaptability to computational constraints, allowing for a tradeoff between accuracy and training cost. Experiments on the SuperGLUE benchmark demonstrate that our PCA-based prompt tuning combined with LoRA maintains full knowledge retention while improving accuracy, utilizing only 1% of the model's parameters. These results establish our approach as a scalable and resource-efficient solution for continual learning in LLMs.

Given a document in a source language, cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims to generate a summary in a different target language. Recently, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5, ChatGPT and GPT-4, has attracted wide attention from the computational linguistics community. However, it is not yet known the performance of LLMs on CLS. In this report, we empirically use various prompts to guide LLMs to perform zero-shot CLS from different paradigms (i.e., end-to-end and pipeline), and provide a preliminary evaluation on the generated summaries. We find that ChatGPT and GPT-4 originally prefer to produce lengthy summaries with detailed information. These two LLMs can further balance informativeness and conciseness with the help of an interactive prompt, significantly improving their CLS performance. Experimental results on three widely-used CLS datasets show that GPT-4 achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot CLS performance, and performs competitively compared with the fine-tuned mBART-50. Moreover, we also find some multi-lingual and bilingual LLMs (i.e., BLOOMZ, ChatGLM-6B, Vicuna-13B and ChatYuan) have limited zero-shot CLS ability. Due to the composite nature of CLS, which requires models to perform summarization and translation simultaneously, accomplishing this task in a zero-shot manner is even a challenge for LLMs. Therefore, we sincerely hope and recommend future LLM research could use CLS as a testbed.

The integration of Computer-Assisted Diagnosis (CAD) with Large Language Models (LLMs) holds great potential in clinical applications, specifically in the roles of virtual family doctors and clinic assistants. However, current works in this field are plagued by limitations, specifically a restricted scope of applicable image domains and the provision of unreliable medical advice. This restricts their overall processing capabilities. Furthermore, the mismatch in writing style between LLMs and radiologists undermines their practical usefulness. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ChatCAD+, which is designed to be universal and reliable. It is capable of handling medical images from diverse domains and leveraging up-to-date information from reputable medical websites to provide reliable medical advice. Additionally, it incorporates a template retrieval system that improves report generation performance via exemplar reports. This approach ensures greater consistency with the expertise of human professionals. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhaozh10/ChatCAD.

With the advancements in conversational AI, such as ChatGPT, this paper focuses on exploring developing Large Language Models (LLMs) for non-English languages, especially emphasizing alignment with human preferences. We introduce a computationally efficient method, leveraging chat vector, to synergize pre-existing knowledge and behaviors in LLMs, restructuring the conventional training paradigm from continual pre-train -> SFT -> RLHF to continual pre-train + chat vector. Our empirical studies, primarily focused on Traditional Chinese, employ LLaMA2 as the base model and acquire the chat vector by subtracting the pre-trained weights, LLaMA2, from the weights of LLaMA2-chat. Evaluating from three distinct facets, which are toxicity, ability of instruction following, and multi-turn dialogue demonstrates the chat vector's superior efficacy in chatting. To confirm the adaptability of our approach, we extend our experiments to include models pre-trained in both Korean and Simplified Chinese, illustrating the versatility of our methodology. Overall, we present a significant solution in aligning LLMs with human preferences efficiently across various languages, accomplished by the chat vector.

Recruiting patients to participate in clinical trials can be challenging and time-consuming. Usually, participation in a clinical trial is initiated by a healthcare professional and proposed to the patient. Promoting clinical trials directly to patients via online recruitment might help to reach them more efficiently. In this study, we address the case where a patient is initiating their own recruitment process and wants to determine whether they are eligible for a given clinical trial, using their own language to describe their medical profile. To study whether this creates difficulties in the patient trial matching process, we design a new dataset and task, Natural Language Inference for Patient Recruitment (NLI4PR), in which patient language profiles must be matched to clinical trials. We create it by adapting the TREC 2022 Clinical Trial Track dataset, which provides patients' medical profiles, and rephrasing them manually using patient language. We also use the associated clinical trial reports where the patients are either eligible or excluded. We prompt several open-source Large Language Models on our task and achieve from 56.5 to 71.8 of F1 score using patient language, against 64.7 to 73.1 for the same task using medical language. When using patient language, we observe only a small loss in performance for the best model, suggesting that having the patient as a starting point could be adopted to help recruit patients for clinical trials. The corpus and code bases are all freely available on our Github and HuggingFace repositories.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding. While demonstrating proficiency in everyday conversations and question-answering situations, these models frequently struggle in domains that require precision, such as medical applications, due to their lack of domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we describe the procedure for building a powerful, open-source language model specifically designed for medicine applications, termed as PMC-LLaMA. Our contributions are threefold: (i) we systematically investigate the process of adapting a general-purpose foundation language model towards medical domain, this involves data-centric knowledge injection through the integration of 4.8M biomedical academic papers and 30K medical textbooks, as well as comprehensive fine-tuning for alignment with domain-specific instructions; (ii) we contribute a large-scale, comprehensive dataset for instruction tuning. This dataset encompasses medical question-answering (QA), rationale for reasoning, and conversational dialogues, comprising a total of 202M tokens; (iii) we conduct thorough ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of each proposed component. While evaluating on various public medical question-answering benchmarks, our lightweight PMCLLaMA, which consists of only 13 billion parameters, exhibits superior performance, even surpassing ChatGPT. All models, codes, datasets can be found in https://github.com/chaoyi-wu/PMC-LLaMA.

Existing continual learning (CL) methods mainly rely on fine-tuning or adapting large language models (LLMs). They still suffer from catastrophic forgetting (CF). Little work has been done to exploit in-context learning (ICL) to leverage the extensive knowledge within LLMs for CL without updating any parameters. However, incrementally learning each new task in ICL necessitates adding training examples from each class of the task to the prompt, which hampers scalability as the prompt length increases. This issue not only leads to excessively long prompts that exceed the input token limit of the underlying LLM but also degrades the model's performance due to the overextended context. To address this, we introduce InCA, a novel approach that integrates an external continual learner (ECL) with ICL to enable scalable CL without CF. The ECL is built incrementally to pre-select a small subset of likely classes for each test instance. By restricting the ICL prompt to only these selected classes, InCA prevents prompt lengths from becoming excessively long, while maintaining high performance. Experimental results demonstrate that InCA significantly outperforms existing CL baselines, achieving substantial performance gains.

Conversational Recommender System (CRS), which aims to recommend high-quality items to users through interactive conversations, has gained great research interest recently. A CRS is usually composed of a recommendation module and a generation module. In the previous work, these two modules are loosely connected in the model training and are shallowly integrated during inference, where a simple switching or copy mechanism is adopted to incorporate recommended items into generated responses. Moreover, the current end-to-end neural models trained on small crowd-sourcing datasets (e.g., 10K dialogs in the ReDial dataset) tend to overfit and have poor chit-chat ability. In this work, we propose a novel unified framework that integrates recommendation into the dialog (RecInDial) generation by introducing a vocabulary pointer. To tackle the low-resource issue in CRS, we finetune the large-scale pretrained language models to generate fluent and diverse responses, and introduce a knowledge-aware bias learned from an entity-oriented knowledge graph to enhance the recommendation performance. Furthermore, we propose to evaluate the CRS models in an end-to-end manner, which can reflect the overall performance of the entire system rather than the performance of individual modules, compared to the separate evaluations of the two modules used in previous work. Experiments on the benchmark dataset ReDial show our RecInDial model significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art methods. More extensive analyses show the effectiveness of our model.

Recent advancements in long-context language models (LCLMs) promise to transform Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by simplifying pipelines. With their expanded context windows, LCLMs can process entire knowledge bases and perform retrieval and reasoning directly -- a capability we define as In-Context Retrieval and Reasoning (ICR^2). However, existing benchmarks like LOFT often overestimate LCLM performance by providing overly simplified contexts. To address this, we introduce ICR^2, a benchmark that evaluates LCLMs in more realistic scenarios by including confounding passages retrieved with strong retrievers. We then propose three methods to enhance LCLM performance: (1) retrieve-then-generate fine-tuning, (2) retrieval-attention-probing, which uses attention heads to filter and de-noise long contexts during decoding, and (3) joint retrieval head training alongside the generation head. Our evaluation of five well-known LCLMs on LOFT and ICR^2 demonstrates significant gains with our best approach applied to Mistral-7B: +17 and +15 points by Exact Match on LOFT, and +13 and +2 points on ICR^2, compared to vanilla RAG and supervised fine-tuning, respectively. It even outperforms GPT-4-Turbo on most tasks despite being a much smaller model.

In 2022, with the release of ChatGPT, large-scale language models gained widespread attention. ChatGPT not only surpassed previous models in terms of parameters and the scale of its pretraining corpus but also achieved revolutionary performance improvements through fine-tuning on a vast amount of high-quality, human-annotated data. This progress has led enterprises and research institutions to recognize that building smarter and more powerful models relies on rich and high-quality datasets. Consequently, the construction and optimization of datasets have become a critical focus in the field of artificial intelligence. This paper summarizes the current state of pretraining and fine-tuning data for training large-scale language models, covering aspects such as data scale, collection methods, data types and characteristics, processing workflows, and provides an overview of available open-source datasets.

When asked, current large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT claim that they can assist us with relevance judgments. Many researchers think this would not lead to credible IR research. In this perspective paper, we discuss possible ways for LLMs to assist human experts along with concerns and issues that arise. We devise a human-machine collaboration spectrum that allows categorizing different relevance judgment strategies, based on how much the human relies on the machine. For the extreme point of "fully automated assessment", we further include a pilot experiment on whether LLM-based relevance judgments correlate with judgments from trained human assessors. We conclude the paper by providing two opposing perspectives - for and against the use of LLMs for automatic relevance judgments - and a compromise perspective, informed by our analyses of the literature, our preliminary experimental evidence, and our experience as IR researchers. We hope to start a constructive discussion within the community to avoid a stale-mate during review, where work is dammed if is uses LLMs for evaluation and dammed if it doesn't.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) generate recommendations through an interactive process. However, not all CRS approaches use human conversations as their source of interaction data; the majority of prior CRS work simulates interactions by exchanging entity-level information. As a result, claims of prior CRS work do not generalise to real-world settings where conversations take unexpected turns, or where conversational and intent understanding is not perfect. To tackle this challenge, the research community has started to examine holistic CRS, which are trained using conversational data collected from real-world scenarios. Despite their emergence, such holistic approaches are under-explored. We present a comprehensive survey of holistic CRS methods by summarizing the literature in a structured manner. Our survey recognises holistic CRS approaches as having three components: 1) a backbone language model, the optional use of 2) external knowledge, and/or 3) external guidance. We also give a detailed analysis of CRS datasets and evaluation methods in real application scenarios. We offer our insight as to the current challenges of holistic CRS and possible future trends.

Conversational multi-doc question answering aims to answer specific questions based on the retrieved documents as well as the contextual conversations. In this paper, we introduce our winning approach for the "Conversational Multi-Doc QA" challenge in WSDM Cup 2024, which exploits the superior natural language understanding and generation capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). We first adapt LLMs to the task, then devise a hybrid training strategy to make the most of in-domain unlabeled data. Moreover, an advanced text embedding model is adopted to filter out potentially irrelevant documents and several approaches are designed and compared for the model ensemble. Equipped with all these techniques, our solution finally ranked 1st place in WSDM Cup 2024, surpassing its rivals to a large extent. The source codes have been released at https://github.com/zhangzhao219/WSDM-Cup-2024.

Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, PaLM, and LLaMa, have been shown to achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language tasks. Recent advancements in instruction tuning bring LLMs with ability in following user's instructions and producing human-like responses. However, the high costs associated with training and implementing LLMs pose challenges to academic research. Furthermore, the availability of pretrained LLMs and instruction-tune datasets for Vietnamese language is limited. To tackle these concerns, we leverage large-scale instruction-following datasets from open-source projects, namely Alpaca, GPT4All, and Chat-Doctor, which cover general domain and specific medical domain. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first instructional dataset for Vietnamese. Subsequently, we utilize parameter-efficient tuning through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on two open LLMs: Bloomz (Multilingual) and GPTJ-6B (Vietnamese), resulting four models: Bloomz-Chat, Bloomz-Doctor, GPTJ-Chat, GPTJ-Doctor.Finally, we assess the effectiveness of our methodology on a per-sample basis, taking into consideration the helpfulness, relevance, accuracy, level of detail in their responses. This evaluation process entails the utilization of GPT-4 as an automated scoring mechanism. Despite utilizing a low-cost setup, our method demonstrates about 20-30\% improvement over the original models in our evaluation tasks.

We propose the shared task of cross-lingual conversation summarization, ConvSumX Challenge, opening new avenues for researchers to investigate solutions that integrate conversation summarization and machine translation. This task can be particularly useful due to the emergence of online meetings and conferences. We construct a new benchmark, covering 2 real-world scenarios and 3 language directions, including a low-resource language. We hope that ConvSumX can motivate researches to go beyond English and break the barrier for non-English speakers to benefit from recent advances of conversation summarization.

Retrieval-augmented generation enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating relevant information from external knowledge sources. This enables LLMs to adapt to specific domains and mitigate hallucinations in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing retrievers are often misaligned with LLMs due to their separate training processes and the black-box nature of LLMs. To address this challenge, we propose ARL2, a retriever learning technique that harnesses LLMs as labelers. ARL2 leverages LLMs to annotate and score relevant evidence, enabling learning the retriever from robust LLM supervision. Furthermore, ARL2 uses an adaptive self-training strategy for curating high-quality and diverse relevance data, which can effectively reduce the annotation cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ARL2, achieving accuracy improvements of 5.4% on NQ and 4.6% on MMLU compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, ARL2 exhibits robust transfer learning capabilities and strong zero-shot generalization abilities. Our code will be published at https://github.com/zhanglingxi-cs/ARL2.

The advancement of Large Language Models(LLMs) has brought substantial attention to the Chain of Thought(CoT) approach, primarily due to its ability to enhance the capability of LLMs on tasks requiring complex reasoning. Moreover, the significance of CoT approaches extends to the application of LLMs for multi-modal tasks, such as multi-modal question answering. However, the selection of optimal CoT demonstration examples in multi-modal reasoning for LLMs remains less explored for LLMs due to the inherent complexity of multi-modal examples. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that addresses this challenge by using retrieval mechanisms to dynamically and automatically select demonstration examples based on cross-modal similarities. This method aims to refine the CoT reasoning process in multi-modal scenarios via informing LLMs with more relevant and informative examples. Furthermore, we employ a stratified sampling method categorising demonstration examples into groups based on their types and retrieving examples from different groups respectively to promote the diversity of demonstration examples. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the performance of LLMs, achieving state-of-the-art results in multi-modal reasoning tasks. Specifically, our methods demonstrate significant advancements on the ScienceQA dataset. While our method based on ChatGPT outperforms the Chameleon(ChatGPT) by 2.74% with an accuracy of 82.67%, the GPT4-based approach surpasses the Chameleon(GPT-4) by 0.89%, achieving 87.43% on accuracy under the same setting. Moreover, our best performing show a 6.05% increase over Chameleon for ChatGPT-based models and a 4.57% increase for GPT-4-based models.

Large-scale pre-training has shown remarkable performance in building open-domain dialogue systems. However, previous works mainly focus on showing and evaluating the conversational performance of the released dialogue model, ignoring the discussion of some key factors towards a powerful human-like chatbot, especially in Chinese scenarios. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate these under-explored factors, including data quality control, model architecture designs, training approaches, and decoding strategies. We propose EVA2.0, a large-scale pre-trained open-domain Chinese dialogue model with 2.8 billion parameters, and make our models and code publicly available. To our knowledge, EVA2.0 is the largest open-source Chinese dialogue model. Automatic and human evaluations show that our model significantly outperforms other open-source counterparts. We also discuss the limitations of this work by presenting some failure cases and pose some future directions.

In today's interconnected globe, moving abroad is more and more prevalent, whether it's for employment, refugee resettlement, or other causes. Language difficulties between natives and immigrants present a common issue on a daily basis, especially in medical domain. This can make it difficult for patients and doctors to communicate during anamnesis or in the emergency room, which compromises patient care. The goal of the HYKIST Project is to develop a speech translation system to support patient-doctor communication with ASR and MT. ASR systems have recently displayed astounding performance on particular tasks for which enough quantities of training data are available, such as LibriSpeech. Building a good model is still difficult due to a variety of speaking styles, acoustic and recording settings, and a lack of in-domain training data. In this thesis, we describe our efforts to construct ASR systems for a conversational telephone speech recognition task in the medical domain for Vietnamese language to assist emergency room contact between doctors and patients across linguistic barriers. In order to enhance the system's performance, we investigate various training schedules and data combining strategies. We also examine how best to make use of the little data that is available. The use of publicly accessible models like XLSR-53 is compared to the use of customized pre-trained models, and both supervised and unsupervised approaches are utilized using wav2vec 2.0 as architecture.

Despite the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in general image tasks, a gap persists in the medical field for a multimodal large model adept at handling the nuanced diversity of medical images. Addressing this, we propose MedXChat, a unified multimodal large model designed for seamless interactions between medical assistants and users. MedXChat encompasses three key functionalities: CXR(Chest X-ray)-to-Report generation, CXR-based visual question-answering (VQA), and Text-to-CXR synthesis. Our contributions are as follows. Firstly, our model showcases exceptional cross-task adaptability, displaying adeptness across all three defined tasks and outperforming the benchmark models on the MIMIC dataset in medical multimodal applications. Secondly, we introduce an innovative Text-to-CXR synthesis approach that utilizes instruction-following capabilities within the Stable Diffusion (SD) architecture. This technique integrates smoothly with the existing model framework, requiring no extra parameters, thereby maintaining the SD's generative strength while also bestowing upon it the capacity to render fine-grained medical images with high fidelity. Comprehensive experiments validate MedXChat's synergistic enhancement across all tasks. Our instruction data and model will be open-sourced.

Here we show that a Large Language Model (LLM) can serve as a foundation model for a Chemical Language Model (CLM) which performs at or above the level of CLMs trained solely on chemical SMILES string data. Using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO) on the open-source Llama LLM, we demonstrate that we can train an LLM to respond to prompts such as generating molecules with properties of interest to drug development. This overall framework allows an LLM to not just be a chatbot client for chemistry and materials tasks, but can be adapted to speak more directly as a CLM which can generate molecules with user-specified properties.

The recent success of ChatGPT and GPT-4 has drawn widespread attention to multimodal dialogue systems. However, the academia community lacks a dataset that can validate the multimodal generation capabilities of Visual Language Models (VLMs) in textual-visual chat tasks. In this paper, we construct two new multimodal datasets: the synthetic CLEVR-ATVC dataset (620K) and the manually pictured Fruit-ATVC dataset (50K), both featuring visual and text-based inputs and outputs. Additionally, to enable the multimodal system to reject human requests (i.e., demonstrate accountability), as in language-based ChatGPT conversations, we develop and incorporate specific rules into the datasets as supervisory signals. This allows the trained VLM to provide a yes or no answer after visual and textual reasoning, accompanied by a language explanation as to why the human instruction cannot be excuted. In our method, we propose a two-state training procedure to train the image auto-encoder and auto-regressive transformer from scratch. The first state involves a discrete variational autoencoder (dVAE) to compress each image into short tokens, which are then concatenated with text tokens as a single data stream to be fed into the decoder-based transformer for generating visual re-creation and textual feedback in the second state. We provide comprehensive analyses of experimental results in terms of re-created image quality, answer accuracy, and the model behavior when faced with uncertainty and imperfect user queries. We hope our explorations and findings contribute valuable insights regarding the accountability of textual-visual generative models.

Causal Language Modeling (CLM) and Masked Language Modeling (MLM) are two mainstream learning paradigms based on Transformer networks, specifically the Decoder-only and Encoder-only architectures. The strengths of each paradigm in downstream tasks have shown a mix of advantages and disadvantages. In the past BabyLM Challenge 2023, although the MLM paradigm achieved the best average performance, the CLM paradigm demonstrated significantly faster convergence rates. For the BabyLM Challenge 2024, we propose a novel language modeling paradigm named AntLM, which integrates both CLM and MLM to leverage the advantages of these two classic paradigms. We chose the strict-small track and conducted experiments on two foundation models: BabyLlama, representing CLM, and LTG-BERT, representing MLM. During the training process for specific foundation models, we alternate between applying CLM or MLM training objectives and causal or bidirectional attention masks. Experimental results show that combining the two pretraining objectives leverages their strengths, enhancing overall training performance. Under the same epochs, AntLM_{BabyLlama} improves Macro-average by 1%, and AntLM_{LTG-BERT} achieves a 2.2% increase over the baselines.

Large-scale Causal Language Models (CLMs), e.g., GPT3 and ChatGPT, have brought great success in text generation. However, it is still an open challenge to control the generation process of CLM while balancing flexibility, control granularity, and generation efficiency. In this paper, we provide a new alternative for controllable text generation (CTG), by designing a non-intrusive, lightweight control plugin to accompany the generation of CLM at arbitrary time steps. The proposed control plugin, namely Residual Memory Transformer (RMT), has an encoder-decoder setup, which can accept any types of control conditions and cooperate with CLM through a residual learning paradigm, to achieve a more flexible, general, and efficient CTG. Extensive experiments are carried out on various control tasks, in the form of both automatic and human evaluations. The results show the superiority of RMT over a range of state-of-the-art approaches, proving the effectiveness and versatility of our approach.

While most existing works on LLM prompting techniques focus only on how to select a better set of data samples inside one single prompt input (In-Context Learning or ICL), why can not we design and leverage multiple prompts together to further improve the LLM's performance? In this work, we propose In-Context Sampling (ICS), a low-resource LLM prompting technique to produce confident predictions by optimizing the construction of multiple ICL prompt inputs. Extensive experiments with three open-source LLMs (FlanT5-XL, Mistral-7B, and Mixtral-8x7B) on four NLI datasets (e-SNLI, Multi-NLI, ANLI, and Contract-NLI) and one QA dataset (CommonsenseQA) illustrate that ICS can consistently enhance LLMs' performance. An in-depth evaluation with three data similarity-based ICS strategies suggests that these strategies can further elevate LLM's performance, which sheds light on a new yet promising future research direction.

We introduce a new approach to generative data-driven dialogue systems (e.g. chatbots) called TransferTransfo which is a combination of a Transfer learning based training scheme and a high-capacity Transformer model. Fine-tuning is performed by using a multi-task objective which combines several unsupervised prediction tasks. The resulting fine-tuned model shows strong improvements over the current state-of-the-art end-to-end conversational models like memory augmented seq2seq and information-retrieval models. On the privately held PERSONA-CHAT dataset of the Conversational Intelligence Challenge 2, this approach obtains a new state-of-the-art, with respective perplexity, Hits@1 and F1 metrics of 16.28 (45 % absolute improvement), 80.7 (46 % absolute improvement) and 19.5 (20 % absolute improvement).

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have received substantial attention due to their impressive human language understanding and generation capabilities. Therefore, the application of LLMs in medicine to assist physicians and patient care emerges as a promising research direction in both artificial intelligence and clinical medicine. To reflect this trend, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of the principles, applications, and challenges faced by LLMs in medicine. Specifically, we aim to address the following questions: 1) How can medical LLMs be built? 2) What are the downstream performances of medical LLMs? 3) How can medical LLMs be utilized in real-world clinical practice? 4) What challenges arise from the use of medical LLMs? and 5) How can we better construct and utilize medical LLMs? As a result, this survey aims to provide insights into the opportunities and challenges of LLMs in medicine and serve as a valuable resource for constructing practical and effective medical LLMs. A regularly updated list of practical guides on medical LLMs can be found at https://github.com/AI-in-Health/MedLLMsPracticalGuide.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been gaining increasing attention and demonstrated promising performance across a variety of Software Engineering (SE) tasks, such as Automated Program Repair (APR), code summarization, and code completion. For example, ChatGPT, the latest black-box LLM, has been investigated by numerous recent research studies and has shown impressive performance in various tasks. However, there exists a potential risk of data leakage since these LLMs are usually close-sourced with unknown specific training details, e.g., pre-training datasets. In this paper, we seek to review the bug-fixing capabilities of ChatGPT on a clean APR benchmark with different research objectives. We first introduce {\benchmark}, a new benchmark with buggy and the corresponding fixed programs from competitive programming problems starting from 2023, after the training cutoff point of ChatGPT. The results on {\benchmark} show that ChatGPT is able to fix 109 out of 151 buggy programs using the basic prompt within 35 independent rounds, outperforming state-of-the-art LLMs CodeT5 and PLBART by 27.5\% and 62.4\% prediction accuracy. We also investigate the impact of three types of prompts, i.e., problem description, error feedback, and bug localization, leading to additional 34 fixed bugs. Besides, we provide additional discussion from the interactive nature of ChatGPT to illustrate the capacity of a dialog-based repair workflow with 9 additional fixed bugs. Inspired by the findings, we further pinpoint various challenges and opportunities for advanced SE study equipped with such LLMs (e.g.,~ChatGPT) in the near future. More importantly, our work calls for more research on the reevaluation of the achievements obtained by existing black-box LLMs across various SE tasks, not limited to ChatGPT on APR.

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) aim to provide recommendation services via natural language conversations. Although a number of approaches have been proposed for developing capable CRSs, they typically rely on sufficient training data for training. Since it is difficult to annotate recommendation-oriented dialogue datasets, existing CRS approaches often suffer from the issue of insufficient training due to the scarcity of training data. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a CounterFactual data simulation approach for CRS, named CFCRS, to alleviate the issue of data scarcity in CRSs. Our approach is developed based on the framework of counterfactual data augmentation, which gradually incorporates the rewriting to the user preference from a real dialogue without interfering with the entire conversation flow. To develop our approach, we characterize user preference and organize the conversation flow by the entities involved in the dialogue, and design a multi-stage recommendation dialogue simulator based on a conversation flow language model. Under the guidance of the learned user preference and dialogue schema, the flow language model can produce reasonable, coherent conversation flows, which can be further realized into complete dialogues. Based on the simulator, we perform the intervention at the representations of the interacted entities of target users, and design an adversarial training method with a curriculum schedule that can gradually optimize the data augmentation strategy. Extensive experiments show that our approach can consistently boost the performance of several competitive CRSs, and outperform other data augmentation methods, especially when the training data is limited. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/CFCRS.

Dialogue-based language models mark a huge milestone in the field of artificial intelligence, by their impressive ability to interact with users, as well as a series of challenging tasks prompted by customized instructions. However, the prevalent large-scale dialogue-based language models like ChatGPT still have room for improvement, such as unstable responses to questions and the inability to think cooperatively like humans. Considering the ability of dialogue-based language models in conversation and their inherent randomness in thinking, we propose ChatLLM network that allows multiple dialogue-based language models to interact, provide feedback, and think together. We design the network of ChatLLMs based on ChatGPT. Specifically, individual instances of ChatGPT may possess distinct perspectives towards the same problem, and by consolidating these diverse viewpoints via a separate ChatGPT, the ChatLLM network system can conduct decision-making more objectively and comprehensively. In addition, a language-based feedback mechanism comparable to backpropagation is devised to update the ChatGPTs within the network. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our network attains significant improvements in problem-solving, leading to observable progress amongst each member.

ChatGPT-like models have revolutionized various applications in artificial intelligence, from summarization and coding to translation, matching or even surpassing human performance. However, the current landscape lacks an accessible, efficient, and cost-effective end-to-end RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback) training pipeline for these powerful models, particularly when training at the scale of billions of parameters. This paper introduces DeepSpeed-Chat, a novel system that democratizes RLHF training, making it accessible to the AI community. DeepSpeed-Chat offers three key capabilities: an easy-to-use training and inference experience for ChatGPT-like models, a DeepSpeed-RLHF pipeline that replicates the training pipeline from InstructGPT, and a robust DeepSpeed-RLHF system that combines various optimizations for training and inference in a unified way. The system delivers unparalleled efficiency and scalability, enabling training of models with hundreds of billions of parameters in record time and at a fraction of the cost. With this development, DeepSpeed-Chat paves the way for broader access to advanced RLHF training, even for data scientists with limited resources, thereby fostering innovation and further development in the field of AI.

In this paper, we describe our participation in the subtask 1 of CASE-2022, Event Causality Identification with Casual News Corpus. We address the Causal Relation Identification (CRI) task by exploiting a set of simple yet complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models (LMs) on a small number of annotated examples (i.e., a few-shot configuration). We follow a prompt-based prediction approach for fine-tuning LMs in which the CRI task is treated as a masked language modeling problem (MLM). This approach allows LMs natively pre-trained on MLM problems to directly generate textual responses to CRI-specific prompts. We compare the performance of this method against ensemble techniques trained on the entire dataset. Our best-performing submission was fine-tuned with only 256 instances per class, 15.7% of the all available data, and yet obtained the second-best precision (0.82), third-best accuracy (0.82), and an F1-score (0.85) very close to what was reported by the winner team (0.86).

To build a high-quality open-domain chatbot, we introduce the effective training process of PLATO-2 via curriculum learning. There are two stages involved in the learning process. In the first stage, a coarse-grained generation model is trained to learn response generation under the simplified framework of one-to-one mapping. In the second stage, a fine-grained generative model augmented with latent variables and an evaluation model are further trained to generate diverse responses and to select the best response, respectively. PLATO-2 was trained on both Chinese and English data, whose effectiveness and superiority are verified through comprehensive evaluations, achieving new state-of-the-art results.

The evolution from Large Language Models (LLMs) to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has spurred research into extending In-Context Learning (ICL) to its multimodal counterpart. Existing such studies have primarily concentrated on image-to-text ICL. However, the Text-to-Image ICL (T2I-ICL), with its unique characteristics and potential applications, remains underexplored. To address this gap, we formally define the task of T2I-ICL and present CoBSAT, the first T2I-ICL benchmark dataset, encompassing ten tasks. Utilizing our dataset to benchmark six state-of-the-art MLLMs, we uncover considerable difficulties MLLMs encounter in solving T2I-ICL. We identify the primary challenges as the inherent complexity of multimodality and image generation. To overcome these challenges, we explore strategies like fine-tuning and Chain-of-Thought prompting, demonstrating notable improvements. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/UW-Madison-Lee-Lab/CoBSAT.

In-context learning (ICL) is an astonishing emergent ability of large language models (LLMs). By presenting a prompt that includes multiple input-output pairs as examples and introducing a new query input, models can generate the corresponding output. However, the performance of models heavily relies on the quality of the input prompt when implementing in-context learning. Biased or imbalanced input prompts can significantly degrade the performance of language models. To address this issue, we introduce a reweighted algorithm called RICL (Reweighted In-context Learning). This algorithm fine-tunes language models using an unbiased validation set to determine the optimal weight for each input-output example to approximate unbiased in-context learning. Furthermore, we also introduce a low-cost reweighted algorithm, a linear optimal weight approximation algorithm called LARICL (Linear Approximation of Reweighted In-context Learning). This algorithm requires minimal training cost while providing effective results. We prove the convergence of our algorithm and validate its performance through experiments conducted on a numerical dataset. The experimental findings reveal a substantial improvement in comparison to benchmarks including the performance of casual prompt-based in-context learning and the performance of a classic fine-tuning method.

In this work, we present HuixiangDou, a technical assistant powered by Large Language Models (LLM). This system is designed to assist algorithm developers by providing insightful responses to questions related to open-source algorithm projects, such as computer vision and deep learning projects from OpenMMLab. We further explore the integration of this assistant into the group chats of instant messaging (IM) tools such as WeChat and Lark. Through several iterative improvements and trials, we have developed a sophisticated technical chat assistant capable of effectively answering users' technical questions without causing message flooding. This paper's contributions include: 1) Designing an algorithm pipeline specifically for group chat scenarios; 2) Verifying the reliable performance of text2vec in task rejection; 3) Identifying three critical requirements for LLMs in technical-assistant-like products, namely scoring ability, In-Context Learning (ICL), and Long Context. We have made the source code, android app and web service available at Github (https://github.com/internlm/huixiangdou), OpenXLab (https://openxlab.org.cn/apps/detail/tpoisonooo/huixiangdou-web) and YouTube (https://youtu.be/ylXrT-Tei-Y) to aid in future research and application. HuixiangDou is applicable to any group chat within IM tools.

Frozen models trained to mimic static datasets can never improve their performance. Models that can employ internet-retrieval for up-to-date information and obtain feedback from humans during deployment provide the promise of both adapting to new information, and improving their performance. In this work we study how to improve internet-driven conversational skills in such a learning framework. We collect deployment data, which we make publicly available, of human interactions, and collect various types of human feedback -- including binary quality measurements, free-form text feedback, and fine-grained reasons for failure. We then study various algorithms for improving from such feedback, including standard supervised learning, rejection sampling, model-guiding and reward-based learning, in order to make recommendations on which type of feedback and algorithms work best. We find the recently introduced Director model (Arora et al., '22) shows significant improvements over other existing approaches.

In this paper, we propose MPC (Modular Prompted Chatbot), a new approach for creating high-quality conversational agents without the need for fine-tuning. Our method utilizes pre-trained large language models (LLMs) as individual modules for long-term consistency and flexibility, by using techniques such as few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought (CoT), and external memory. Our human evaluation results show that MPC is on par with fine-tuned chatbot models in open-domain conversations, making it an effective solution for creating consistent and engaging chatbots.

Online education platforms, leveraging the internet to distribute education resources, seek to provide convenient education but often fall short in real-time communication with students. They often struggle to offer personalized education resources due to the challenge of addressing the diverse obstacles students encounter throughout their learning journey. Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, offers the possibility for resolving this issue by comprehending individual requests. Although LLMs have been successful in various fields, creating an LLM-based education system is still challenging for the wide range of educational skills required. This paper reviews the recently emerged LLM researches related to educational capabilities, including mathematics, writing, programming, reasoning, and knowledge-based question answering, with the aim to explore their potential in constructing the next-generation intelligent education system. Based on the current development status, we further outline two approaches for an LLM-based education system: a unified approach and a mixture-of-expert (MoE) approach. Finally, we explore the challenges and future directions, providing new research opportunities and perspectives on adapting LLMs for education.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong in-context learning (ICL) abilities with a few demonstrations. However, one critical challenge is how to select demonstrations to elicit the full potential of LLMs. In this paper, we propose Curriculum Demonstration Selection (CDS), a novel demonstration selection method for ICL. Instead of merely using similarity, CDS additionally partitions samples by their complexity measurements. Following curriculum learning, CDS then selects demonstrations from easy to difficult. Thus the selected demonstrations cover a wide range of difficulty levels, enabling LLMs to learn from varied complexities within the training set. Experiments demonstrate that our CDS consistently outperforms baseline methods, achieving notable improvements across nine LLMs on three benchmarks. Moreover, CDS proves especially effective in enhancing LLM performance in solving challenging problems.

The BabyLM Challenge is a community effort to close the data-efficiency gap between human and computational language learners. Participants compete to optimize language model training on a fixed language data budget of 100 million words or less. This year, we released improved text corpora, as well as a vision-and-language corpus to facilitate research into cognitively plausible vision language models. Submissions were compared on evaluation tasks targeting grammatical ability, (visual) question answering, pragmatic abilities, and grounding, among other abilities. Participants could submit to a 10M-word text-only track, a 100M-word text-only track, and/or a 100M-word and image multimodal track. From 31 submissions employing diverse methods, a hybrid causal-masked language model architecture outperformed other approaches. No submissions outperformed the baselines in the multimodal track. In follow-up analyses, we found a strong relationship between training FLOPs and average performance across tasks, and that the best-performing submissions proposed changes to the training data, training objective, and model architecture. This year's BabyLM Challenge shows that there is still significant room for innovation in this setting, in particular for image-text modeling, but community-driven research can yield actionable insights about effective strategies for small-scale language modeling.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalizability, such as understanding arbitrary entities and relations. Instruction tuning has proven effective for distilling LLMs into more cost-efficient models such as Alpaca and Vicuna. Yet such student models still trail the original LLMs by large margins in downstream applications. In this paper, we explore targeted distillation with mission-focused instruction tuning to train student models that can excel in a broad application class such as open information extraction. Using named entity recognition (NER) for case study, we show how ChatGPT can be distilled into much smaller UniversalNER models for open NER. For evaluation, we assemble the largest NER benchmark to date, comprising 43 datasets across 9 diverse domains such as biomedicine, programming, social media, law, finance. Without using any direct supervision, UniversalNER attains remarkable NER accuracy across tens of thousands of entity types, outperforming general instruction-tuned models such as Alpaca and Vicuna by over 30 absolute F1 points in average. With a tiny fraction of parameters, UniversalNER not only acquires ChatGPT's capability in recognizing arbitrary entity types, but also outperforms its NER accuracy by 7-9 absolute F1 points in average. Remarkably, UniversalNER even outperforms by a large margin state-of-the-art multi-task instruction-tuned systems such as InstructUIE, which uses supervised NER examples. We also conduct thorough ablation studies to assess the impact of various components in our distillation approach. We will release the distillation recipe, data, and UniversalNER models to facilitate future research on targeted distillation.

Here, we present the outcomes from the second Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry, which engaged participants across global hybrid locations, resulting in 34 team submissions. The submissions spanned seven key application areas and demonstrated the diverse utility of LLMs for applications in (1) molecular and material property prediction; (2) molecular and material design; (3) automation and novel interfaces; (4) scientific communication and education; (5) research data management and automation; (6) hypothesis generation and evaluation; and (7) knowledge extraction and reasoning from scientific literature. Each team submission is presented in a summary table with links to the code and as brief papers in the appendix. Beyond team results, we discuss the hackathon event and its hybrid format, which included physical hubs in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin, Lausanne, and Tokyo, alongside a global online hub to enable local and virtual collaboration. Overall, the event highlighted significant improvements in LLM capabilities since the previous year's hackathon, suggesting continued expansion of LLMs for applications in materials science and chemistry research. These outcomes demonstrate the dual utility of LLMs as both multipurpose models for diverse machine learning tasks and platforms for rapid prototyping custom applications in scientific research.

Information retrieval (IR) systems have played a vital role in modern digital life and have cemented their continued usefulness in this new era of generative AI via retrieval-augmented generation. With strong language processing capabilities and remarkable versatility, large language models (LLMs) have become popular choices for zero-shot re-ranking in IR systems. So far, LLM-based re-ranking methods rely on strong generative capabilities, which restricts their use to either specialized or powerful proprietary models. Given these restrictions, we ask: is autoregressive generation necessary and optimal for LLMs to perform re-ranking? We hypothesize that there are abundant signals relevant to re-ranking within LLMs that might not be used to their full potential via generation. To more directly leverage such signals, we propose in-context re-ranking (ICR), a novel method that leverages the change in attention pattern caused by the search query for accurate and efficient re-ranking. To mitigate the intrinsic biases in LLMs, we propose a calibration method using a content-free query. Due to the absence of generation, ICR only requires two (O(1)) forward passes to re-rank N documents, making it substantially more efficient than generative re-ranking methods that require at least O(N) forward passes. Our novel design also enables ICR to be applied to any LLM without specialized training while guaranteeing a well-formed ranking. Extensive experiments with two popular open-weight LLMs on standard single-hop and multi-hop information retrieval benchmarks show that ICR outperforms RankGPT while cutting the latency by more than 60% in practice. Through detailed analyses, we show that ICR's performance is specially strong on tasks that require more complex re-ranking signals. Our findings call for further exploration on novel ways of utilizing open-weight LLMs beyond text generation.

ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) created by OpenAI that has been carefully trained on a large amount of data. It has revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) and has pushed the boundaries of LLM capabilities. ChatGPT has played a pivotal role in enabling widespread public interaction with generative artificial intelligence (GAI) on a large scale. It has also sparked research interest in developing similar technologies and investigating their applications and implications. In this paper, our primary goal is to provide a concise survey on the current lines of research on ChatGPT and its evolution. We considered both the glass box and black box views of ChatGPT, encompassing the components and foundational elements of the technology, as well as its applications, impacts, and implications. The glass box approach focuses on understanding the inner workings of the technology, and the black box approach embraces it as a complex system, and thus examines its inputs, outputs, and effects. This paves the way for a comprehensive exploration of the technology and provides a road map for further research and experimentation. We also lay out essential foundational literature on LLMs and GAI in general and their connection with ChatGPT. This overview sheds light on existing and missing research lines in the emerging field of LLMs, benefiting both public users and developers. Furthermore, the paper delves into the broad spectrum of applications and significant concerns in fields such as education, research, healthcare, finance, etc.

With the recent significant advancements in large multi-modal models (LMMs), the importance of their grounding capability in visual chat is increasingly recognized. Despite recent efforts to enable LMMs to support grounding, their capabilities for grounding and chat are usually separate, and their chat performance drops dramatically when asked to ground. The problem is the lack of a dataset for grounded visual chat (GVC). Existing grounding datasets only contain short captions. To address this issue, we have created GVC data that allows for the combination of grounding and chat capabilities. To better evaluate the GVC capabilities, we have introduced a benchmark called Grounding-Bench. Additionally, we have proposed a model design that can support GVC and various types of visual prompts by connecting segmentation models with language models. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms other LMMs on Grounding-Bench. Furthermore, our model achieves competitive performance on classic grounding benchmarks like RefCOCO/+/g and Flickr30K Entities. Our code will be released at https://github.com/UX-Decoder/LLaVA-Grounding .

Large language models LLMs like ChatGPT have reached the 100 Mio user barrier in record time and might increasingly enter all areas of our life leading to a diverse set of interactions between those Artificial Intelligence models and humans. While many studies have discussed governance and regulations deductively from first-order principles, few studies provide an inductive, data-driven lens based on observing dialogues between humans and LLMs especially when it comes to non-collaborative, competitive situations that have the potential to pose a serious threat to people. In this work, we conduct a user study engaging over 40 individuals across all age groups in price negotiations with an LLM. We explore how people interact with an LLM, investigating differences in negotiation outcomes and strategies. Furthermore, we highlight shortcomings of LLMs with respect to their reasoning capabilities and, in turn, susceptiveness to prompt hacking, which intends to manipulate the LLM to make agreements that are against its instructions or beyond any rationality. We also show that the negotiated prices humans manage to achieve span a broad range, which points to a literacy gap in effectively interacting with LLMs.

Many-shot in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a unique setup to both utilize and test the ability of large language models to handle long context. This paper delves into long-context language model (LCLM) evaluation through many-shot ICL. We first ask: what types of ICL tasks benefit from additional demonstrations, and how effective are they in evaluating LCLMs? We find that classification and summarization tasks show performance improvements with additional demonstrations, while translation and reasoning tasks do not exhibit clear trends. Next, we investigate the extent to which different tasks necessitate retrieval versus global context understanding. We develop metrics to categorize ICL tasks into two groups: (i) similar-sample learning (SSL): tasks where retrieval of the most similar examples is sufficient for good performance, and (ii) all-sample learning (ASL): tasks that necessitate a deeper comprehension of all examples in the prompt. Lastly, we introduce a new many-shot ICL benchmark, MANYICLBENCH, to characterize model's ability on both fronts and benchmark 12 LCLMs using MANYICLBENCH. We find that while state-of-the-art models demonstrate good performance up to 64k tokens in SSL tasks, many models experience significant performance drops at only 16k tokens in ASL tasks.

Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) are well-known for being capable of solving a task simply by conditioning a few input-label pairs dubbed demonstrations on a prompt without being explicitly tuned for the desired downstream task. Such a process (i.e., in-context learning), however, naturally leads to high reliance on the demonstrations which are usually selected from external datasets. In this paper, we propose self-generated in-context learning (SG-ICL), which generates demonstrations for in-context learning from PLM itself to minimize the reliance on the external demonstration. We conduct experiments on four different text classification tasks and show SG-ICL significantly outperforms zero-shot learning and is generally worth approximately 0.6 gold training samples. Moreover, our generated demonstrations show more consistent performance with low variance compared to randomly selected demonstrations from the training dataset.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the impressive ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) from only a few examples, but the success of ICL varies widely from task to task. Thus, it is important to quickly determine whether ICL is applicable to a new task, but directly evaluating ICL accuracy can be expensive in situations where test data is expensive to annotate -- the exact situations where ICL is most appealing. In this paper, we propose the task of ICL accuracy estimation, in which we predict the accuracy of an LLM when doing in-context learning on a new task given only unlabeled test data for that task. To perform ICL accuracy estimation, we propose a method that trains a meta-model using LLM confidence scores as features. We compare our method to several strong accuracy estimation baselines on a new benchmark that covers 4 LLMs and 3 task collections. The meta-model improves over all baselines across 8 out of 12 settings and achieves the same estimation performance as directly evaluating on 40 collected labeled test examples per task. At the same time, no existing approach provides an accurate and reliable ICL accuracy estimation in every setting, highlighting the need for better ways to measure the uncertainty of LLM predictions.

Regulatory compliance in the pharmaceutical industry entails navigating through complex and voluminous guidelines, often requiring significant human resources. To address these challenges, our study introduces a chatbot model that utilizes generative AI and the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) method. This chatbot is designed to search for guideline documents relevant to the user inquiries and provide answers based on the retrieved guidelines. Recognizing the inherent need for high reliability in this domain, we propose the Question and Answer Retrieval Augmented Generation (QA-RAG) model. In comparative experiments, the QA-RAG model demonstrated a significant improvement in accuracy, outperforming all other baselines including conventional RAG methods. This paper details QA-RAG's structure and performance evaluation, emphasizing its potential for the regulatory compliance domain in the pharmaceutical industry and beyond. We have made our work publicly available for further research and development.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown superior performance without task-specific fine-tuning. Despite the success, the knowledge stored in the parameters of LLMs could still be incomplete and difficult to update due to the computational costs. As complementary, retrieval-based methods can offer non-parametric world knowledge and improve the performance on tasks such as question answering. However, we find that the retrieved knowledge does not always help and even has a negative impact on original responses occasionally. To better make use of both internal knowledge and external world knowledge, we investigate eliciting the model's ability to recognize what they know and do not know (which is also called self-knowledge) and propose Self-Knowledge guided Retrieval augmentation (SKR), a simple yet effective method which can let LLMs refer to the questions they have previously encountered and adaptively call for external resources when dealing with new questions. We evaluate SKR on multiple datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms chain-of-thought based and fully retrieval-based methods by using either InstructGPT or ChatGPT.

Large language models (LLMs) famously exhibit emergent in-context learning (ICL) -- the ability to rapidly adapt to new tasks using few-shot examples provided as a prompt, without updating the model's weights. Built on top of LLMs, vision large language models (VLLMs) have advanced significantly in areas such as recognition, reasoning, and grounding. However, investigations into multimodal ICL have predominantly focused on few-shot visual question answering (VQA), and image captioning, which we will show neither exploit the strengths of ICL, nor test its limitations. The broader capabilities and limitations of multimodal ICL remain under-explored. In this study, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark VL-ICL Bench for multimodal in-context learning, encompassing a broad spectrum of tasks that involve both images and text as inputs and outputs, and different types of challenges, from {perception to reasoning and long context length}. We evaluate the abilities of state-of-the-art VLLMs against this benchmark suite, revealing their diverse strengths and weaknesses, and showing that even the most advanced models, such as GPT-4, find the tasks challenging. By highlighting a range of new ICL tasks, and the associated strengths and limitations of existing models, we hope that our dataset will inspire future work on enhancing the in-context learning capabilities of VLLMs, as well as inspire new applications that leverage VLLM ICL. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ys-zong/VL-ICL.

This paper contains what the Georgetown InfoSense group has done in regard to solving the challenges presented by TREC iKAT 2023. Our submitted runs outperform the median runs by a significant margin, exhibiting superior performance in nDCG across various cut numbers and in overall success rate. Our approach uses a Generate-Retrieve-Generate method, which we've found to greatly outpace Retrieve-Then-Generate approaches for the purposes of iKAT. Our solution involves the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for initial answers, answer grounding by BM25, passage quality filtering by logistic regression, and answer generation by LLMs again. We leverage several purpose-built Language Models, including BERT, Chat-based, and text-to-transfer-based models, for text understanding, classification, generation, and summarization. The official results of the TREC evaluation contradict our initial self-evaluation, which may suggest that a decrease in the reliance on our retrieval and classification methods is better. Nonetheless, our findings suggest that the sequence of involving these different components matters, where we see an essentiality of using LLMs before using search engines.

In-context learning (ICL) facilitates Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibiting emergent ability on downstream tasks without updating billions of parameters. However, in the area of multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), two problems hinder the application of multi-modal ICL: (1) Most primary MLLMs are only trained on single-image datasets, making them unable to read multi-modal demonstrations. (2) With the demonstrations increasing, thousands of visual tokens highly challenge hardware and degrade ICL performance. During preliminary explorations, we discovered that the inner LLM tends to focus more on the linguistic modality within multi-modal demonstrations to generate responses. Therefore, we propose a general and light-weighted framework AIM to tackle the mentioned problems through Aggregating Image information of Multimodal demonstrations to the dense latent space of the corresponding linguistic part. Specifically, AIM first uses the frozen backbone MLLM to read each image-text demonstration and extracts the vector representations on top of the text. These vectors naturally fuse the information of the image-text pair, and AIM transforms them into fused virtual tokens acceptable for the inner LLM via a trainable projection layer. Ultimately, these fused tokens function as variants of multi-modal demonstrations, fed into the MLLM to direct its response to the current query as usual. Because these fused tokens stem from the textual component of the image-text pair, a multi-modal demonstration is nearly reduced to a pure textual demonstration, thus seamlessly applying to any MLLMs. With its de facto MLLM frozen, AIM is parameter-efficient and we train it on public multi-modal web corpora which have nothing to do with downstream test tasks.

This study constructed a Japanese chat dataset for tuning large language models (LLMs), which consist of about 8.4 million records. Recently, LLMs have been developed and gaining popularity. However, high-performing LLMs are usually mainly for English. There are two ways to support languages other than English by those LLMs: constructing LLMs from scratch or tuning existing models. However, in both ways, datasets are necessary parts. In this study, we focused on supporting Japanese in those LLMs and making a dataset for training or tuning LLMs in Japanese. The dataset we constructed consisted of various tasks, such as translation and knowledge tasks. In our experiment, we tuned an existing LLM using our dataset and evaluated the performance qualitatively. The results suggest that our dataset is possibly beneficial for LLMs. However, we also revealed some difficulties in constructing LLMs in languages other than English.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in various Natural Language Processing tasks. For automatic open-domain dialogue evaluation in particular, LLMs have been seamlessly integrated into evaluation frameworks, and together with human evaluation, compose the backbone of most evaluations. However, existing evaluation benchmarks often rely on outdated datasets and evaluate aspects like Fluency and Relevance, which fail to adequately capture the capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art chatbot models. This paper critically examines current evaluation benchmarks, highlighting that the use of older response generators and quality aspects fail to accurately reflect modern chatbot capabilities. A small annotation experiment on a recent LLM-generated dataset (SODA) reveals that LLM evaluators such as GPT-4 struggle to detect actual deficiencies in dialogues generated by current LLM chatbots.

With the development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), numerous outstanding accomplishments have emerged within the open-source community. Due to the complexity of creating and training multimodal data pairs, it is still a computational and time-consuming process to build powerful MLLMs. In this work, we introduce Capybara-OMNI, an MLLM that trains in a lightweight and efficient manner and supports understanding text, image, video, and audio modalities. We present in detail the framework design, the data construction, and the training recipe, to develop an MLLM step-by-step to obtain competitive performance. We also provide exclusive benchmarks utilized in our experiments to show how to properly verify understanding capabilities across different modalities. Results show that by following our guidance, we can efficiently build an MLLM that achieves competitive performance among models of the same scale on various multimodal benchmarks. Additionally, to enhance the multimodal instruction following and conversational capabilities of the model, we further discuss how to train the chat version upon an MLLM understanding model, which is more in line with user habits for tasks like real-time interaction with humans. We publicly disclose the Capybara-OMNI model, along with its chat-based version. The disclosure includes both the model weights, a portion of the training data, and the inference codes, which are made available on GitHub.

Persuasion plays a pivotal role in a wide range of applications from health intervention to the promotion of social good. Persuasive chatbots can accelerate the positive effects of persuasion in such applications. Existing methods rely on fine-tuning persuasive chatbots with task-specific training data which is costly, if not infeasible, to collect. To address this issue, we propose a method to leverage the generalizability and inherent persuasive abilities of large language models (LLMs) in creating effective and truthful persuasive chatbot for any given domain in a zero-shot manner. Unlike previous studies which used pre-defined persuasion strategies, our method first uses an LLM to generate responses, then extracts the strategies used on the fly, and replaces any unsubstantiated claims in the response with retrieved facts supporting the strategies. We applied our chatbot, PersuaBot, to three significantly different domains needing persuasion skills: donation solicitation, recommendations, and health intervention. Our experiments on simulated and human conversations show that our zero-shot approach is more persuasive than prior work, while achieving factual accuracy surpassing state-of-the-art knowledge-oriented chatbots. Our study demonstrated that when persuasive chatbots are employed responsibly for social good, it is an enabler of positive individual and social change.

The GPT-4o represents a significant milestone in enabling real-time interaction with large language models (LLMs) through speech, its remarkable low latency and high fluency not only capture attention but also stimulate research interest in the field. This real-time speech interaction is particularly valuable in scenarios requiring rapid feedback and immediate responses, dramatically enhancing user experience. However, there is a notable lack of research focused on real-time large speech language models, particularly for Chinese. In this work, we present KE-Omni, a seamless large speech language model built upon Ke-SpeechChat, a large-scale high-quality synthetic speech interaction dataset consisting of 7 million Chinese and English conversations, featuring 42,002 speakers, and totaling over 60,000 hours, This contributes significantly to the advancement of research and development in this field. The demos can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/spaces/KE-Team/KE-Omni.

The widespread availability of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has significantly impacted education, raising both opportunities and challenges. Students can frequently interact with LLM-powered, interactive learning tools, but their usage patterns need to be analyzed to ensure ethical usage of these tools. To better understand how students interact with LLMs in an academic setting, we introduce StudyChat, a publicly available dataset capturing real-world student interactions with an LLM-powered tutoring chatbot in a semester-long, university-level artificial intelligence (AI) course. We deploy a web application that replicates ChatGPT's core functionalities, and use it to log student interactions with the LLM while working on programming assignments. We collect 1,197 conversations, which we annotate using a dialogue act labeling schema inspired by observed interaction patterns and prior research. Additionally, we analyze these interactions, highlight behavioral trends, and analyze how specific usage patterns relate to course outcomes. StudyChat provides a rich resource for the learning sciences and AI in education communities, enabling further research into the evolving role of LLMs in education.

The burgeoning field of Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by sophisticated models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence. These models, however, bring forth substantial challenges in the high consumption of computational, memory, energy, and financial resources, especially in environments with limited resource capabilities. This survey aims to systematically address these challenges by reviewing a broad spectrum of techniques designed to enhance the resource efficiency of LLMs. We categorize methods based on their optimization focus: computational, memory, energy, financial, and network resources and their applicability across various stages of an LLM's lifecycle, including architecture design, pretraining, finetuning, and system design. Additionally, the survey introduces a nuanced categorization of resource efficiency techniques by their specific resource types, which uncovers the intricate relationships and mappings between various resources and corresponding optimization techniques. A standardized set of evaluation metrics and datasets is also presented to facilitate consistent and fair comparisons across different models and techniques. By offering a comprehensive overview of the current sota and identifying open research avenues, this survey serves as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners, aiding them in developing more sustainable and efficient LLMs in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in conversational systems due to their advanced understanding and generative capabilities in general contexts. However, their effectiveness in task-oriented dialogues (TOD), which requires not only response generation but also effective dialogue state tracking (DST) within specific tasks and domains, remains less satisfying. In this work, we propose a novel approach FnCTOD for solving DST with LLMs through function calling. This method improves zero-shot DST, allowing adaptation to diverse domains without extensive data collection or model tuning. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves exceptional performance with both modestly sized open-source and also proprietary LLMs: with in-context prompting it enables various 7B or 13B parameter models to surpass the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) achieved by ChatGPT, and improves ChatGPT's performance beating the SOTA by 5.6% Avg. JGA. Individual model results for GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are boosted by 4.8% and 14%, respectively. We also show that by fine-tuning on a small collection of diverse task-oriented dialogues, we can equip modestly sized models, specifically a 13B parameter LLaMA2-Chat model, with function-calling capabilities and DST performance comparable to ChatGPT while maintaining their chat capabilities. We plan to open-source experimental code and model.

HC4 is a new suite of test collections for ad hoc Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), with Common Crawl News documents in Chinese, Persian, and Russian, topics in English and in the document languages, and graded relevance judgments. New test collections are needed because existing CLIR test collections built using pooling of traditional CLIR runs have systematic gaps in their relevance judgments when used to evaluate neural CLIR methods. The HC4 collections contain 60 topics and about half a million documents for each of Chinese and Persian, and 54 topics and five million documents for Russian. Active learning was used to determine which documents to annotate after being seeded using interactive search and judgment. Documents were judged on a three-grade relevance scale. This paper describes the design and construction of the new test collections and provides baseline results for demonstrating their utility for evaluating systems.

We present DR.DECR (Dense Retrieval with Distillation-Enhanced Cross-Lingual Representation), a new cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) system trained using multi-stage knowledge distillation (KD). The teacher of DR.DECR relies on a highly effective but computationally expensive two-stage inference process consisting of query translation and monolingual IR, while the student, DR.DECR, executes a single CLIR step. We teach DR.DECR powerful multilingual representations as well as CLIR by optimizing two corresponding KD objectives. Learning useful representations of non-English text from an English-only retriever is accomplished through a cross-lingual token alignment algorithm that relies on the representation capabilities of the underlying multilingual encoders. In both in-domain and zero-shot out-of-domain evaluation, DR.DECR demonstrates far superior accuracy over direct fine-tuning with labeled CLIR data. It is also the best single-model retriever on the XOR-TyDi benchmark at the time of this writing.

In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark for Persian (Farsi) text embeddings, built upon the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). Our benchmark includes 63 datasets spanning seven different tasks: classification, clustering, pair classification, reranking, retrieval, summary retrieval, and semantic textual similarity. The datasets are formed as a combination of existing, translated, and newly generated data, offering a diverse evaluation framework for Persian language models. Given the increasing use of text embedding models in chatbots, evaluation datasets are becoming inseparable ingredients in chatbot challenges and Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. As a contribution, we include chatbot evaluation datasets in the MTEB benchmark for the first time. In addition, in this paper, we introduce the new task of summary retrieval which is not part of the tasks included in standard MTEB. Another contribution of this paper is the introduction of a substantial number of new Persian language NLP datasets suitable for training and evaluation, some of which have no previous counterparts in Persian. We evaluate the performance of several Persian and multilingual embedding models in a range of tasks. This work introduces an open-source benchmark with datasets, code and a public leaderboard.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) further improves the capabilities of open-domain dialogue systems and can generate fluent, coherent, and diverse responses. However, LLMs still lack a crucial ability: communication skills. This limitation renders them more like information seeking tools rather than anthropomorphic chatbots. Communication skills, such as topic transition, proactively asking questions, concept guidance, empathy, and summarising often should be taken into consideration, to make LLMs more anthropomorphic and proactive during the conversation, thereby increasing the interest of users and attracting them to chat for longer. However, enabling these communication skills in black-box LLMs remains a key challenge because they do not have the same utterance formation mode as real people: think before speaking. Inspired by linguistics and cognitive science, we empower LLMs with communication skills through inner monologues. To evaluate various communication skills, we construct a benchmark named Cskills, which can also more comprehensively evaluate the dialogue generation ability of the model. Experimental results show that the proposed CSIM strategy improves the backbone models and outperforms the baselines.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a powerful ability for text generation. However, achieving optimal results with a given prompt or instruction can be challenging, especially for billion-sized models. Additionally, undesired behaviors such as toxicity or hallucinations can manifest. While much larger models (e.g., ChatGPT) may demonstrate strength in mitigating these issues, there is still no guarantee of complete prevention. In this work, we propose formalizing text generation as a future-constrained generation problem to minimize undesirable behaviors and enforce faithfulness to instructions. The estimation of future constraint satisfaction, accomplished using LLMs, guides the text generation process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach across three distinct text generation tasks: keyword-constrained generation (Lin et al., 2020), toxicity reduction (Gehman et al., 2020), and factual correctness in question-answering (Gao et al., 2023).

In this technical report, we present TeleChat, a collection of large language models (LLMs) with parameters of 3 billion, 7 billion and 12 billion. It includes pretrained language models as well as fine-tuned chat models that is aligned with human preferences. TeleChat is initially pretrained on an extensive corpus containing a diverse collection of texts from both English and Chinese languages, including trillions of tokens. Subsequently, the model undergoes fine-tuning to align with human preferences, following a detailed methodology that we describe. We evaluate the performance of TeleChat on various tasks, including language understanding, mathematics, reasoning, code generation, and knowledge-based question answering. Our findings indicate that TeleChat achieves comparable performance to other open-source models of similar size across a wide range of public benchmarks. To support future research and applications utilizing LLMs, we release the fine-tuned model checkpoints of TeleChat's 7B and 12B variant, along with code and a portion of our pretraining data, to the public community.

This research delves into the construction and utilization of synthetic datasets, specifically within the telematics sphere, leveraging OpenAI's powerful language model, ChatGPT. Synthetic datasets present an effective solution to challenges pertaining to data privacy, scarcity, and control over variables - characteristics that make them particularly valuable for research pursuits. The utility of these datasets, however, largely depends on their quality, measured through the lenses of diversity, relevance, and coherence. To illustrate this data creation process, a hands-on case study is conducted, focusing on the generation of a synthetic telematics dataset. The experiment involved an iterative guidance of ChatGPT, progressively refining prompts and culminating in the creation of a comprehensive dataset for a hypothetical urban planning scenario in Columbus, Ohio. Upon generation, the synthetic dataset was subjected to an evaluation, focusing on the previously identified quality parameters and employing descriptive statistics and visualization techniques for a thorough analysis. Despite synthetic datasets not serving as perfect replacements for actual world data, their potential in specific use-cases, when executed with precision, is significant. This research underscores the potential of AI models like ChatGPT in enhancing data availability for complex sectors like telematics, thus paving the way for a myriad of new research opportunities.

This paper proposes a framework for quantitatively evaluating interactive LLMs such as ChatGPT using publicly available data sets. We carry out an extensive technical evaluation of ChatGPT using 23 data sets covering 8 different common NLP application tasks. We evaluate the multitask, multilingual and multi-modal aspects of ChatGPT based on these data sets and a newly designed multimodal dataset. We find that ChatGPT outperforms LLMs with zero-shot learning on most tasks and even outperforms fine-tuned models on some tasks. We find that it is better at understanding non-Latin script languages than generating them. It is able to generate multimodal content from textual prompts, via an intermediate code generation step. Moreover, we find that ChatGPT is 63.41% accurate on average in 10 different reasoning categories under logical reasoning, non-textual reasoning, and commonsense reasoning, hence making it an unreliable reasoner. It is, for example, better at deductive than inductive reasoning. ChatGPT suffers from hallucination problems like other LLMs and it generates more extrinsic hallucinations from its parametric memory as it does not have access to an external knowledge base. Finally, the interactive feature of ChatGPT enables human collaboration with the underlying LLM to improve its performance, i.e, 8% ROUGE-1 on summarization and 2% ChrF++ on machine translation, in a multi-turn "prompt engineering" fashion. We also release codebase for evaluation set extraction.

Large Language Models (LLM) often needs to be Continual Pre-Trained (CPT) to obtain the unfamiliar language skill or adapt into new domains. The huge training cost of CPT often asks for cautious choice of key hyper-parameters such as the mixture ratio of extra language or domain corpus. However, there is no systematic study which bridge the gap between the optimal mixture ratio and the actual model performance, and the gap between experimental scaling law and the actual deployment in the full model size. In this paper, we perform CPT on Llama-3 8B and 70B to enhance its Chinese ability. We study the optimal correlation between the Additional Language Mixture Ratio (ALMR) and the Learning Rate (LR) on the 8B size which directly indicate the optimal experimental set up. By thorough choice of hyper-parameter, and subsequent fine-tuning, the model capability is improved not only on the Chinese-related benchmark, but also some specific domains including math, coding and emotional intelligence. We deploy the final 70B version of LLM on an real-life chat system which obtain satisfying performance.

We introduce ClusterLLM, a novel text clustering framework that leverages feedback from an instruction-tuned large language model, such as ChatGPT. Compared with traditional unsupervised methods that builds upon "small" embedders, ClusterLLM exhibits two intriguing advantages: (1) it enjoys the emergent capability of LLM even if its embeddings are inaccessible; and (2) it understands the user's preference on clustering through textual instruction and/or a few annotated data. First, we prompt ChatGPT for insights on clustering perspective by constructing hard triplet questions <does A better correspond to B than C>, where A, B and C are similar data points that belong to different clusters according to small embedder. We empirically show that this strategy is both effective for fine-tuning small embedder and cost-efficient to query ChatGPT. Second, we prompt ChatGPT for helps on clustering granularity by carefully designed pairwise questions <do A and B belong to the same category>, and tune the granularity from cluster hierarchies that is the most consistent with the ChatGPT answers. Extensive experiments on 14 datasets show that ClusterLLM consistently improves clustering quality, at an average cost of ~$0.6 per dataset.

Relying on human experts to evaluate CEFR speaking assessments in an e-learning environment creates scalability challenges, as it limits how quickly and widely assessments can be conducted. We aim to automate the evaluation of CEFR B2 English speaking assessments in e-learning environments from conversation transcripts. First, we evaluate the capability of leading open source and commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) to score a candidate's performance across various criteria in the CEFR B2 speaking exam in both global and India-specific contexts. Next, we create a new expert-validated, CEFR-aligned synthetic conversational dataset with transcripts that are rated at different assessment scores. In addition, new instruction-tuned datasets are developed from the English Vocabulary Profile (up to CEFR B2 level) and the CEFR-SP WikiAuto datasets. Finally, using these new datasets, we perform parameter efficient instruction tuning of Mistral Instruct 7B v0.2 to develop a family of models called EvalYaks. Four models in this family are for assessing the four sections of the CEFR B2 speaking exam, one for identifying the CEFR level of vocabulary and generating level-specific vocabulary, and another for detecting the CEFR level of text and generating level-specific text. EvalYaks achieved an average acceptable accuracy of 96%, a degree of variation of 0.35 levels, and performed 3 times better than the next best model. This demonstrates that a 7B parameter LLM instruction tuned with high-quality CEFR-aligned assessment data can effectively evaluate and score CEFR B2 English speaking assessments, offering a promising solution for scalable, automated language proficiency evaluation.

Most of the existing multi-modal models, hindered by their incapacity to adeptly manage interleaved image-and-text inputs in multi-image, multi-round dialogues, face substantial constraints in resource allocation for training and data accessibility, impacting their adaptability and scalability across varied interaction realms. To address this, we present the DeepSpeed-VisualChat framework, designed to optimize Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating multi-modal capabilities, with a focus on enhancing the proficiency of Large Vision and Language Models in handling interleaved inputs. Our framework is notable for (1) its open-source support for multi-round and multi-image dialogues, (2) introducing an innovative multi-modal causal attention mechanism, and (3) utilizing data blending techniques on existing datasets to assure seamless interactions in multi-round, multi-image conversations. Compared to existing frameworks, DeepSpeed-VisualChat shows superior scalability up to 70B parameter language model size, representing a significant advancement in multi-modal language models and setting a solid foundation for future explorations.

We present a new human-human dialogue dataset - PhotoChat, the first dataset that casts light on the photo sharing behavior in onlin emessaging. PhotoChat contains 12k dialogues, each of which is paired with a user photo that is shared during the conversation. Based on this dataset, we propose two tasks to facilitate research on image-text modeling: a photo-sharing intent prediction task that predicts whether one intends to share a photo in the next conversation turn, and a photo retrieval task that retrieves the most relevant photo according to the dialogue context. In addition, for both tasks, we provide baseline models using the state-of-the-art models and report their benchmark performances. The best image retrieval model achieves 10.4% recall@1 (out of 1000 candidates) and the best photo intent prediction model achieves 58.1% F1 score, indicating that the dataset presents interesting yet challenging real-world problems. We are releasing PhotoChat to facilitate future research work among the community.

ChatGPT is a powerful large language model (LLM) that covers knowledge resources such as Wikipedia and supports natural language question answering using its own knowledge. Therefore, there is growing interest in exploring whether ChatGPT can replace traditional knowledge-based question answering (KBQA) models. Although there have been some works analyzing the question answering performance of ChatGPT, there is still a lack of large-scale, comprehensive testing of various types of complex questions to analyze the limitations of the model. In this paper, we present a framework that follows the black-box testing specifications of CheckList proposed by Ribeiro et. al. We evaluate ChatGPT and its family of LLMs on eight real-world KB-based complex question answering datasets, which include six English datasets and two multilingual datasets. The total number of test cases is approximately 190,000. In addition to the GPT family of LLMs, we also evaluate the well-known FLAN-T5 to identify commonalities between the GPT family and other LLMs. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/tan92hl/Complex-Question-Answering-Evaluation-of-GPT-family.git

Large language models like ChatGPT have shown substantial progress in natural language understanding and generation, proving valuable across various disciplines, including the medical field. Despite advancements, challenges persist due to the complexity and diversity inherent in medical tasks which often require multi-task learning capabilities. Previous approaches, although beneficial, fall short in real-world applications because they necessitate task-specific annotations at inference time, limiting broader generalization. This paper introduces MING-MOE, a novel Mixture-of-Expert~(MOE)-based medical large language model designed to manage diverse and complex medical tasks without requiring task-specific annotations, thus enhancing its usability across extensive datasets. MING-MOE employs a Mixture of Low-Rank Adaptation (MoLoRA) technique, allowing for efficient parameter usage by maintaining base model parameters static while adapting through a minimal set of trainable parameters. We demonstrate that MING-MOE achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on over 20 medical tasks, illustrating a significant improvement over existing models. This approach not only extends the capabilities of medical language models but also improves inference efficiency.

This research explores the integration of large language models (LLMs) into scientific data assimilation, focusing on combustion science as a case study. Leveraging foundational models integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, the study introduces an approach to process diverse combustion research data, spanning experimental studies, simulations, and literature. The multifaceted nature of combustion research emphasizes the critical role of knowledge processing in navigating and extracting valuable information from a vast and diverse pool of sources. The developed approach minimizes computational and economic expenses while optimizing data privacy and accuracy. It incorporates prompt engineering and offline open-source LLMs, offering user autonomy in selecting base models. The study provides a thorough examination of text segmentation strategies, conducts comparative studies between LLMs, and explores various optimized prompts to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework. By incorporating an external database, the framework outperforms a conventional LLM in generating accurate responses and constructing robust arguments. Additionally, the study delves into the investigation of optimized prompt templates for the purpose of efficient extraction of scientific literature. The research addresses concerns related to hallucinations and false research articles by introducing a custom workflow developed with a detection algorithm to filter out inaccuracies. Despite identified areas for improvement, the framework consistently delivers accurate domain-specific responses with minimal human oversight. The prompt-agnostic approach introduced holds promise for future deliberations. The study underscores the significance of integrating LLMs and knowledge processing techniques in scientific research, providing a foundation for advancements in data assimilation and utilization.

We present MultiChallenge, a pioneering benchmark evaluating large language models (LLMs) on conducting multi-turn conversations with human users, a crucial yet underexamined capability for their applications. MultiChallenge identifies four categories of challenges in multi-turn conversations that are not only common and realistic among current human-LLM interactions, but are also challenging to all current frontier LLMs. All 4 challenges require accurate instruction-following, context allocation, and in-context reasoning at the same time. We also develop LLM as judge with instance-level rubrics to facilitate an automatic evaluation method with fair agreement with experienced human raters. Despite achieving near-perfect scores on existing multi-turn evaluation benchmarks, all frontier models have less than 50% accuracy on MultiChallenge, with the top-performing Claude 3.5 Sonnet (June 2024) achieving just a 41.4% average accuracy.

In this paper, we present HuatuoGPT, a large language model (LLM) for medical consultation. The core recipe of HuatuoGPT is to leverage both distilled data from ChatGPT and real-world data from doctors in the supervised fine-tuned stage. The responses of ChatGPT are usually detailed, well-presented and informative while it cannot perform like a doctor in many aspects, e.g. for integrative diagnosis. We argue that real-world data from doctors would be complementary to distilled data in the sense the former could tame a distilled language model to perform like doctors. To better leverage the strengths of both data, we train a reward model to align the language model with the merits that both data bring, following an RLAIF (reinforced learning from AI feedback) fashion. To evaluate and benchmark the models, we propose a comprehensive evaluation scheme (including automatic and manual metrics). Experimental results demonstrate that HuatuoGPT achieves state-of-the-art results in performing medical consultation among open-source LLMs in GPT-4 evaluation, human evaluation, and medical benchmark datasets. It is worth noting that by using additional real-world data and RLAIF, the distilled language model (i.e., HuatuoGPT) outperforms its teacher model ChatGPT in most cases. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/HuatuoGPT. The online demo is available at https://www.HuatuoGPT.cn/.

Safety lies at the core of the development of Large Language Models (LLMs). There is ample work on aligning LLMs with human ethics and preferences, including data filtering in pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and red teaming, etc. In this study, we discover that chat in cipher can bypass the safety alignment techniques of LLMs, which are mainly conducted in natural languages. We propose a novel framework CipherChat to systematically examine the generalizability of safety alignment to non-natural languages -- ciphers. CipherChat enables humans to chat with LLMs through cipher prompts topped with system role descriptions and few-shot enciphered demonstrations. We use CipherChat to assess state-of-the-art LLMs, including ChatGPT and GPT-4 for different representative human ciphers across 11 safety domains in both English and Chinese. Experimental results show that certain ciphers succeed almost 100% of the time to bypass the safety alignment of GPT-4 in several safety domains, demonstrating the necessity of developing safety alignment for non-natural languages. Notably, we identify that LLMs seem to have a ''secret cipher'', and propose a novel SelfCipher that uses only role play and several demonstrations in natural language to evoke this capability. SelfCipher surprisingly outperforms existing human ciphers in almost all cases. Our code and data will be released at https://github.com/RobustNLP/CipherChat.

Large Language Models (LLMs), epitomized by ChatGPT' s release in late 2022, have revolutionized various industries with their advanced language comprehension. However, their efficiency is challenged by the Transformer architecture' s struggle with handling long texts. KV-Cache has emerged as a pivotal solution to this issue, converting the time complexity of token generation from quadratic to linear, albeit with increased GPU memory overhead proportional to conversation length. With the development of the LLM community and academia, various KV-Cache compression methods have been proposed. In this review, we dissect the various properties of KV-Cache and elaborate on various methods currently used to optimize the KV-Cache space usage of LLMs. These methods span the pre-training phase, deployment phase, and inference phase, and we summarize the commonalities and differences among these methods. Additionally, we list some metrics for evaluating the long-text capabilities of large language models, from both efficiency and capability perspectives. Our review thus sheds light on the evolving landscape of LLM optimization, offering insights into future advancements in this dynamic field.

Limited large-scale evaluations exist for facilitation strategies of online discussions due to significant costs associated with human involvement. An effective solution is synthetic discussion simulations using Large Language Models (LLMs) to create initial pilot experiments. We propose a simple, generalizable, LLM-driven methodology to prototype the development of LLM facilitators, and produce high-quality synthetic data without human involvement. We use our methodology to test whether current facilitation strategies can improve the performance of LLM facilitators. We find that, while LLM facilitators significantly improve synthetic discussions, there is no evidence that the application of more elaborate facilitation strategies proposed in modern Social Science research lead to further improvements in discussion quality, compared to more basic approaches. Additionally, we find that small LLMs (such as Mistral Nemo 12B) can perform comparably to larger models (such as LLaMa 70B), and that special instructions must be used for instruction-tuned models to induce toxicity in synthetic discussions. We confirm that each component of our methodology contributes substantially to high quality data via an ablation study. We release an open-source framework, "SynDisco" (pip install syndisco), which implements our methodology. We also release the "Virtual Moderation Dataset" (https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/vmd), a large, publicly available dataset containing LLM-generated and LLM-annotated discussions using multiple open-source LLMs.

The final frontier for simulation is the accurate representation of complex, real-world social systems. While agent-based modeling (ABM) seeks to study the behavior and interactions of agents within a larger system, it is unable to faithfully capture the full complexity of human-driven behavior. Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have emerged as a potential solution to this bottleneck by enabling researchers to explore human-driven interactions in previously unimaginable ways. Our research investigates simulations of human interactions using LLMs. Through prompt engineering, inspired by Park et al. (2023), we present two simulations of believable proxies of human behavior: a two-agent negotiation and a six-agent murder mystery game.

Recently developed large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Llama have demonstrated impressive abilities, and even surpass human-level performance in several tasks. Despite their success, the resource-intensive demands of these models, requiring significant computational power for both training and inference, limit their deployment to high-performance servers. Additionally, the extensive calculation requirements of the models often lead to increased latency in response times. With the increasing need for LLMs to operate efficiently on CPUs, research about lightweight models that are optimized for CPU inference has emerged. In this work, we introduce GEB-1.3B, a lightweight LLM trained on 550 billion tokens in both Chinese and English languages. We employ novel training techniques, including ROPE, Group-Query-Attention, and FlashAttention-2, to accelerate training while maintaining model performance. Additionally, we fine-tune the model using 10 million samples of instruction data to enhance alignment. GEB-1.3B exhibits outstanding performance on general benchmarks such as MMLU, C-Eval, and CMMLU, outperforming comparative models such as MindLLM-1.3B and TinyLLaMA-1.1B. Notably, the FP32 version of GEB-1.3B achieves commendable inference times on CPUs, with ongoing efforts to further enhance speed through advanced quantization techniques. The release of GEB-1.3B as an open-source model marks a significant contribution to the development of lightweight LLMs, promising to foster further research and innovation in the field.

Open-source, multilingual medical large language models (LLMs) have the potential to serve linguistically diverse populations across different regions. Adapting generic LLMs for healthcare often requires continual pretraining, but this approach is computationally expensive and sometimes impractical. Instruction fine-tuning on a specific task may not always guarantee optimal performance due to the lack of broader domain knowledge that the model needs to understand and reason effectively in diverse scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce two multilingual instruction fine-tuning datasets, MMed-IFT and MMed-IFT-MC, containing over 200k high-quality medical samples in six languages. We propose a two-stage training paradigm: the first stage injects general medical knowledge using MMed-IFT, while the second stage fine-tunes task-specific multiple-choice questions with MMed-IFT-MC. Our method achieves competitive results on both English and multilingual benchmarks, striking a balance between computational efficiency and performance. We plan to make our dataset and model weights public at https://github.com/SpassMed/Med-Llama3 in the future.

In-Context Learning (ICL) enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) with demonstrations. However, obtaining these demonstrations primarily relies on manual effort. In most real-world scenarios, users are often unwilling or unable to provide such demonstrations. Inspired by the human analogy, we explore a new ICL paradigm CrossICL to study how to utilize existing source task demonstrations in the ICL for target tasks, thereby obtaining reliable guidance without any additional manual effort. To explore this, we first design a two-stage alignment strategy to mitigate the interference caused by gaps across tasks, as the foundation for our experimental exploration. Based on it, we conduct comprehensive exploration of CrossICL, with 875 NLP tasks from the Super-NI benchmark and six types of LLMs, including GPT-4o. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of CrossICL and provide valuable insights on questions like the criteria for selecting cross-task demonstrations, as well as the types of task-gap-induced interference in CrossICL.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pre-trained on large amounts of data from different sources and domains. These data most often contain trillions of tokens with large portions of copyrighted or proprietary content, which hinders the usage of such models under AI legislation. This raises the need for truly open pre-training data that is compliant with the data security regulations. In this paper, we introduce Common Corpus, the largest open dataset for language model pre-training. The data assembled in Common Corpus are either uncopyrighted or under permissible licenses and amount to about two trillion tokens. The dataset contains a wide variety of languages, ranging from the main European languages to low-resource ones rarely present in pre-training datasets; in addition, it includes a large portion of code data. The diversity of data sources in terms of covered domains and time periods opens up the paths for both research and entrepreneurial needs in diverse areas of knowledge. In this technical report, we present the detailed provenance of data assembling and the details of dataset filtering and curation. Being already used by such industry leaders as Anthropic and multiple LLM training projects, we believe that Common Corpus will become a critical infrastructure for open science research in LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have unlocked new capabilities and applications; however, evaluating the alignment with human preferences still poses significant challenges. To address this issue, we introduce Chatbot Arena, an open platform for evaluating LLMs based on human preferences. Our methodology employs a pairwise comparison approach and leverages input from a diverse user base through crowdsourcing. The platform has been operational for several months, amassing over 240K votes. This paper describes the platform, analyzes the data we have collected so far, and explains the tried-and-true statistical methods we are using for efficient and accurate evaluation and ranking of models. We confirm that the crowdsourced questions are sufficiently diverse and discriminating and that the crowdsourced human votes are in good agreement with those of expert raters. These analyses collectively establish a robust foundation for the credibility of Chatbot Arena. Because of its unique value and openness, Chatbot Arena has emerged as one of the most referenced LLM leaderboards, widely cited by leading LLM developers and companies. Our demo is publicly available at https://chat.lmsys.org.

Information-seeking conversation, which aims to help users gather information through conversation, has achieved great progress in recent years. However, the research is still stymied by the scarcity of training data. To alleviate this problem, we propose AutoConv for synthetic conversation generation, which takes advantage of the few-shot learning ability and generation capacity of large language models (LLM). Specifically, we formulate the conversation generation problem as a language modeling task, then finetune an LLM with a few human conversations to capture the characteristics of the information-seeking process and use it for generating synthetic conversations with high quality. Experimental results on two frequently-used datasets verify that AutoConv has substantial improvements over strong baselines and alleviates the dependence on human annotation. In addition, we also provide several analysis studies to promote future research.

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. With the increase in available context length of LLMs, recent experiments have shown that the performance of ICL does not necessarily scale well in many-shot (demonstration) settings. We theoretically and experimentally confirm that the reason lies in more demonstrations dispersing the model attention from the query, hindering its understanding of key content. Inspired by how humans learn from examples, we propose a training-free method FocusICL, which conducts triviality filtering to avoid attention being diverted by unimportant contents at token-level and operates hierarchical attention to further ensure sufficient attention towards current query at demonstration-level. We also design an efficient hyperparameter searching strategy for FocusICL based on model perplexity of demonstrations. Comprehensive experiments validate that FocusICL achieves an average performance improvement of 5.2% over vanilla ICL and scales well with many-shot demonstrations.

The tremendous success of chat-based AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini stems from Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on vast amount of datasets. However, acquiring high-quality, diverse, and ethically sourced training data remains a significant challenge. We introduce the Open Artificial Knowledge (OAK) dataset, a large-scale resource of over 500 million tokens (at the moment of writing) designed to address this issue. OAK leverages an ensemble of state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT4o, LLaMa3-70B, LLaMa3-8B, Mixtral-8x7B, Gemma-7B, and Gemma-2-9B , to generate high-quality text across diverse domains, guided by Wikipedia's main categories. Our methodology ensures broad knowledge coverage while maintaining coherence and factual accuracy. The OAK dataset aims to foster the development of more capable and aligned language models while addressing critical issues of data scarcity and privacy in LLM training, and it is freely available on www.oakdataset.org.

The recent large language models (LLMs), e.g., ChatGPT, have been able to generate human-like and fluent responses when provided with specific instructions. While admitting the convenience brought by technological advancement, educators also have concerns that students might leverage LLMs to complete their writing assignments and pass them off as their original work. Although many AI content detection studies have been conducted as a result of such concerns, most of these prior studies modeled AI content detection as a classification problem, assuming that a text is either entirely human-written or entirely AI-generated. In this study, we investigated AI content detection in a rarely explored yet realistic setting where the text to be detected is collaboratively written by human and generative LLMs (i.e., hybrid text). We first formalized the detection task as identifying the transition points between human-written content and AI-generated content from a given hybrid text (boundary detection). Then we proposed a two-step approach where we (1) separated AI-generated content from human-written content during the encoder training process; and (2) calculated the distances between every two adjacent prototypes and assumed that the boundaries exist between the two adjacent prototypes that have the furthest distance from each other. Through extensive experiments, we observed the following main findings: (1) the proposed approach consistently outperformed the baseline methods across different experiment settings; (2) the encoder training process can significantly boost the performance of the proposed approach; (3) when detecting boundaries for single-boundary hybrid essays, the proposed approach could be enhanced by adopting a relatively large prototype size, leading to a 22% improvement in the In-Domain evaluation and an 18% improvement in the Out-of-Domain evaluation.

The Natural Language for Optimization (NL4Opt) Competition was created to investigate methods of extracting the meaning and formulation of an optimization problem based on its text description. Specifically, the goal of the competition is to increase the accessibility and usability of optimization solvers by allowing non-experts to interface with them using natural language. We separate this challenging goal into two sub-tasks: (1) recognize and label the semantic entities that correspond to the components of the optimization problem; (2) generate a meaning representation (i.e., a logical form) of the problem from its detected problem entities. The first task aims to reduce ambiguity by detecting and tagging the entities of the optimization problems. The second task creates an intermediate representation of the linear programming (LP) problem that is converted into a format that can be used by commercial solvers. In this report, we present the LP word problem dataset and shared tasks for the NeurIPS 2022 competition. Furthermore, we investigate and compare the performance of the ChatGPT large language model against the winning solutions. Through this competition, we hope to bring interest towards the development of novel machine learning applications and datasets for optimization modeling.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in serving end-users with human-like intelligence. However, LLMs demand high computational resources, making it challenging to deploy them to satisfy various performance objectives, such as meeting the resource constraints on edge devices close to end-users or achieving high accuracy with ample resources. In this paper, we introduce CE-CoLLM, a novel cloud-edge collaboration framework that supports efficient and adaptive LLM inference for end-users at the edge with two modes, (1) low-latency edge standalone inference and (2) highly accurate cloud-edge collaborative inference. First, we show that the inherent high communication costs for transmitting LLM contextual information between the edge and cloud dominate the overall latency, making it inefficient and costly to deploy LLMs using cloud-edge collaboration. Second, we propose several critical techniques to address this challenge, including early-exit mechanism, cloud context manager, and quantization in cloud-edge collaboration to enable not only low-latency standalone edge inference but also efficient and adaptive cloud-edge collaborative inference for LLMs. Third, we perform comprehensive experimental analysis, which demonstrates that CE-CoLLM significantly reduces inference time by up to 13.81% and cloud computation costs by up to 84.55% compared to the popular cloud-based LLM deployment, while maintaining comparable model accuracy. The proposed approach effectively shifts the computational load to the edge, reduces the communication overhead, scales efficiently with multiple edge clients, and provides reliable LLM deployment using cloud-edge collaboration.

The practice of transferring knowledge from a sophisticated, closed-source large language model (LLM) to a compact, open-source LLM has garnered considerable attention. Previous works have focused on a unidirectional knowledge distillation way by aligning the responses of the student model with those of the teacher model to a set of instructions. Nevertheless, they overlooked the possibility of incorporating any reciprocal "feedback"--identifying challenging instructions where the student model's performance falls short--to boost the student model's proficiency iteratively. To this end, we propose a novel adversarial distillation framework for a more efficient knowledge transfer. Leveraging the versatile role adaptability of LLMs, we prompt the closed-source model to identify "hard" instructions and generate new "hard" instructions for the student model, creating a three-stage adversarial loop of imitation, discrimination, and generation. By applying this adversarial framework, we successfully transfer knowledge from ChatGPT to a 7B student model (named Lion), achieving nearly 95% capability approximation using a mere 70k training data. We aspire that this proposed model may serve as the baseline to reflect the performance of ChatGPT, especially the open-source instruction-following language model baseline for our community.

Conversational Query Reformulation (CQR) has significantly advanced in addressing the challenges of conversational search, particularly those stemming from the latent user intent and the need for historical context. Recent works aimed to boost the performance of CRQ through alignment. However, they are designed for one specific retrieval system, which potentially results in poor generalization. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel framework AdaCQR. By aligning reformulation models with both term-based and semantic-based retrieval systems, AdaCQR enhances the generalizability of information-seeking queries across diverse retrieval environments through a dual-phase training strategy. We also developed two effective approaches for acquiring superior labels and diverse input candidates, boosting the efficiency and robustness of the framework. Experimental evaluations on the TopiOCQA and QReCC datasets demonstrate that AdaCQR significantly outperforms existing methods, offering both quantitative and qualitative improvements in conversational query reformulation.

In this work, we introduce ChatQA, a family of conversational question answering (QA) models, that obtain GPT-4 level accuracies. Specifically, we propose a two-stage instruction tuning method that can significantly improve the zero-shot conversational QA results from large language models (LLMs). To handle retrieval in conversational QA, we fine-tune a dense retriever on a multi-turn QA dataset, which provides comparable results to using the state-of-the-art query rewriting model while largely reducing deployment cost. Notably, our ChatQA-70B can outperform GPT-4 in terms of average score on 10 conversational QA datasets (54.14 vs. 53.90), without relying on any synthetic data from OpenAI GPT models.

Traditional applications of natural language processing (NLP) in healthcare have predominantly focused on patient-centered services, enhancing patient interactions and care delivery, such as through medical dialogue systems. However, the potential of NLP to benefit inexperienced doctors, particularly in areas such as communicative medical coaching, remains largely unexplored. We introduce ``ChatCoach,'' an integrated human-AI cooperative framework. Within this framework, both a patient agent and a coaching agent collaboratively support medical learners in practicing their medical communication skills during consultations. Unlike traditional dialogue systems, ChatCoach provides a simulated environment where a human doctor can engage in medical dialogue with a patient agent. Simultaneously, a coaching agent provides real-time feedback to the doctor. To construct the ChatCoach system, we developed a dataset and integrated Large Language Models such as ChatGPT and Llama2, aiming to assess their effectiveness in communicative medical coaching tasks. Our comparative analysis demonstrates that instruction-tuned Llama2 significantly outperforms ChatGPT's prompting-based approaches.

Rapid advancements of large language model (LLM) technologies led to the introduction of powerful open-source instruction-tuned LLMs that have the same text generation quality as the state-of-the-art counterparts such as GPT-4. While the emergence of such models accelerates the adoption of LLM technologies in sensitive-information environments the authors of such models don not disclose the training data necessary for replication of the results thus making the achievements model-exclusive. Since those open-source models are also multilingual this in turn reduces the benefits of training a language specific LLMs as improved inference computation efficiency becomes the only guaranteed advantage of such costly procedure. More cost-efficient options such as vocabulary extension and subsequent continued pre-training are also inhibited by the lack of access to high-quality instruction-tuning data since it is the major factor behind the resulting LLM task-solving capabilities. To address the limitations and cut the costs of the language adaptation pipeline we propose Learned Embedding Propagation (LEP). Unlike existing approaches our method has lower training data size requirements due to minimal impact on existing LLM knowledge which we reinforce using novel ad-hoc embedding propagation procedure that allows to skip the instruction-tuning step and instead implant the new language knowledge directly into any existing instruct-tuned variant. We evaluated four Russian vocabulary adaptations for LLaMa-3-8B and Mistral-7B, showing that LEP is competitive with traditional instruction-tuning methods, achieving performance comparable to OpenChat 3.5 and LLaMa-3-8B-Instruct, with further improvements via self-calibration and continued tuning enhancing task-solving capabilities.

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) aim to recommend suitable items to users through natural language conversation. However, most CRS approaches do not effectively utilize the signal provided by these conversations. They rely heavily on explicit external knowledge e.g., knowledge graphs to augment the models' understanding of the items and attributes, which is quite hard to scale. To alleviate this, we propose an alternative information retrieval (IR)-styled approach to the CRS item recommendation task, where we represent conversations as queries and items as documents to be retrieved. We expand the document representation used for retrieval with conversations from the training set. With a simple BM25-based retriever, we show that our task formulation compares favorably with much more complex baselines using complex external knowledge on a popular CRS benchmark. We demonstrate further improvements using user-centric modeling and data augmentation to counter the cold start problem for CRSs.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown incredible capabilities and transcended the natural language processing (NLP) community, with adoption throughout many services like healthcare, therapy, education, and customer service. Since users include people with critical information needs like students or patients engaging with chatbots, the safety of these systems is of prime importance. Therefore, a clear understanding of the capabilities and limitations of LLMs is necessary. To this end, we systematically evaluate toxicity in over half a million generations of ChatGPT, a popular dialogue-based LLM. We find that setting the system parameter of ChatGPT by assigning it a persona, say that of the boxer Muhammad Ali, significantly increases the toxicity of generations. Depending on the persona assigned to ChatGPT, its toxicity can increase up to 6x, with outputs engaging in incorrect stereotypes, harmful dialogue, and hurtful opinions. This may be potentially defamatory to the persona and harmful to an unsuspecting user. Furthermore, we find concerning patterns where specific entities (e.g., certain races) are targeted more than others (3x more) irrespective of the assigned persona, that reflect inherent discriminatory biases in the model. We hope that our findings inspire the broader AI community to rethink the efficacy of current safety guardrails and develop better techniques that lead to robust, safe, and trustworthy AI systems.

Event Coreference Resolution (ECR) as a pairwise mention classification task is expensive both for automated systems and manual annotations. The task's quadratic difficulty is exacerbated when using Large Language Models (LLMs), making prompt engineering for ECR prohibitively costly. In this work, we propose a graphical representation of events, X-AMR, anchored around individual mentions using a cross-document version of Abstract Meaning Representation. We then linearize the ECR with a novel multi-hop coreference algorithm over the event graphs. The event graphs simplify ECR, making it a) LLM cost-effective, b) compositional and interpretable, and c) easily annotated. For a fair assessment, we first enrich an existing ECR benchmark dataset with these event graphs using an annotator-friendly tool we introduce. Then, we employ GPT-4, the newest LLM by OpenAI, for these annotations. Finally, using the ECR algorithm, we assess GPT-4 against humans and analyze its limitations. Through this research, we aim to advance the state-of-the-art for efficient ECR and shed light on the potential shortcomings of current LLMs at this task. Code and annotations: https://github.com/ahmeshaf/gpt_coref

Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping many aspects of materials science and chemistry research, enabling advances in molecular property prediction, materials design, scientific automation, knowledge extraction, and more. Recent developments demonstrate that the latest class of models are able to integrate structured and unstructured data, assist in hypothesis generation, and streamline research workflows. To explore the frontier of LLM capabilities across the research lifecycle, we review applications of LLMs through 34 total projects developed during the second annual Large Language Model Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry, a global hybrid event. These projects spanned seven key research areas: (1) molecular and material property prediction, (2) molecular and material design, (3) automation and novel interfaces, (4) scientific communication and education, (5) research data management and automation, (6) hypothesis generation and evaluation, and (7) knowledge extraction and reasoning from the scientific literature. Collectively, these applications illustrate how LLMs serve as versatile predictive models, platforms for rapid prototyping of domain-specific tools, and much more. In particular, improvements in both open source and proprietary LLM performance through the addition of reasoning, additional training data, and new techniques have expanded effectiveness, particularly in low-data environments and interdisciplinary research. As LLMs continue to improve, their integration into scientific workflows presents both new opportunities and new challenges, requiring ongoing exploration, continued refinement, and further research to address reliability, interpretability, and reproducibility.

The debut of ChatGPT has recently attracted the attention of the natural language processing (NLP) community and beyond. Existing studies have demonstrated that ChatGPT shows significant improvement in a range of downstream NLP tasks, but the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT in terms of recommendations remain unclear. In this study, we aim to conduct an empirical analysis of ChatGPT's recommendation ability from an Information Retrieval (IR) perspective, including point-wise, pair-wise, and list-wise ranking. To achieve this goal, we re-formulate the above three recommendation policies into a domain-specific prompt format. Through extensive experiments on four datasets from different domains, we demonstrate that ChatGPT outperforms other large language models across all three ranking policies. Based on the analysis of unit cost improvements, we identify that ChatGPT with list-wise ranking achieves the best trade-off between cost and performance compared to point-wise and pair-wise ranking. Moreover, ChatGPT shows the potential for mitigating the cold start problem and explainable recommendation. To facilitate further explorations in this area, the full code and detailed original results are open-sourced at https://github.com/rainym00d/LLM4RS.

This study evaluates the performance of large language models (LLMs) as medical agents in Portuguese, aiming to develop a reliable and relevant virtual assistant for healthcare professionals. The HealthCareMagic-100k-en and MedQuAD datasets, translated from English using GPT-3.5, were used to fine-tune the ChatBode-7B model using the PEFT-QLoRA method. The InternLM2 model, with initial training on medical data, presented the best overall performance, with high precision and adequacy in metrics such as accuracy, completeness and safety. However, DrBode models, derived from ChatBode, exhibited a phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting of acquired medical knowledge. Despite this, these models performed frequently or even better in aspects such as grammaticality and coherence. A significant challenge was low inter-rater agreement, highlighting the need for more robust assessment protocols. This work paves the way for future research, such as evaluating multilingual models specific to the medical field, improving the quality of training data, and developing more consistent evaluation methodologies for the medical field.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various natural language processing and software engineering tasks, such as code generation. The LLMs are mainly utilized in the prompt-based zero/few-shot paradigm to guide the model in accomplishing the task. GPT-based models are one of the popular ones studied for tasks such as code comment generation or test generation. These tasks are `generative' tasks. However, there is limited research on the usage of LLMs for `non-generative' tasks such as classification using the prompt-based paradigm. In this preliminary exploratory study, we investigated the applicability of LLMs for Code Clone Detection (CCD), a non-generative task. By building a mono-lingual and cross-lingual CCD dataset derived from CodeNet, we first investigated two different prompts using ChatGPT to detect Type-4 code clones in Java-Java and Java-Ruby pairs in a zero-shot setting. We then conducted an analysis to understand the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT in CCD. ChatGPT surpasses the baselines in cross-language CCD attaining an F1-score of 0.877 and achieves comparable performance to fully fine-tuned models for mono-lingual CCD, with an F1-score of 0.878. Also, the prompt and the difficulty level of the problems has an impact on the performance of ChatGPT. Finally we provide insights and future directions based on our initial analysis

Recent multi-modal Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o have demonstrated strong capabilities of direct speech interaction. However, the lack of specialized and comprehensive benchmarks for end-to-end speech LLM evaluation hinders optimizing the user experience of Audio LLMs in real-world applications. Existing evaluation methods often adapt text-based benchmarks, overlooking speech's unique characteristics and challenges, including prosody, homophones, stuttering, and differing user expectations. Here, we present a novel approach to thoroughly evaluate LLMs in practical speech conversations. We systematically curate real-world chat data relevant to spoken scenarios, introduce diversity in speaker attributes and acoustic conditions, and augment the dataset with speech-specific phenomena. We further design a query-aware evaluation method to use customized evaluation checklists and prompts to enhance the accuracy of automatic evaluation. We conduct comprehensive testing and detailed analysis of various mainstream speech models, revealing significant differences in model performance across different speech scenarios. The use of query-aware evaluation further enables a finer-grained assessment under various speech-specific scenarios. Our benchmark can provide valuable insights for speech model development and evaluation.

Large pretrained language models (LMs) have shown impressive In-Context Learning (ICL) ability, where the model learns to do an unseen task via a prompt consisting of input-output examples as the demonstration, without any parameter updates. The performance of ICL is highly dominated by the quality of the selected in-context examples. However, previous selection methods are mostly based on simple heuristics, leading to sub-optimal performance. In this work, we formulate in-context example selection as a subset selection problem. We propose CEIL (Compositional Exemplars for In-context Learning), which is instantiated by Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) to model the interaction between the given input and in-context examples, and optimized through a carefully-designed contrastive learning objective to obtain preference from LMs. We validate CEIL on 12 classification and generation datasets from 7 distinct NLP tasks, including sentiment analysis, paraphrase detection, natural language inference, commonsense reasoning, open-domain question answering, code generation, and semantic parsing. Extensive experiments demonstrate not only the state-of-the-art performance but also the transferability and compositionality of CEIL, shedding new light on effective and efficient in-context learning. Our code is released at https://github.com/HKUNLP/icl-ceil.

This paper presents a performance comparison of three large language models (LLMs), namely OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing Chat (BingChat), and Google Bard, on the VNHSGE English dataset. The performance of BingChat, Bard, and ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) is 92.4\%, 86\%, and 79.2\%, respectively. The results show that BingChat is better than ChatGPT and Bard. Therefore, BingChat and Bard can replace ChatGPT while ChatGPT is not yet officially available in Vietnam. The results also indicate that BingChat, Bard and ChatGPT outperform Vietnamese students in English language proficiency. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of the potential of LLMs in English language education. The remarkable performance of ChatGPT, BingChat, and Bard demonstrates their potential as effective tools for teaching and learning English at the high school level.

Personalization in Information Retrieval (IR) is a topic studied by the research community since a long time. However, there is still a lack of datasets to conduct large-scale evaluations of personalized IR; this is mainly due to the fact that collecting and curating high-quality user-related information requires significant costs and time investment. Furthermore, the creation of datasets for Personalized IR (PIR) tasks is affected by both privacy concerns and the need for accurate user-related data, which are often not publicly available. Recently, researchers have started to explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic datasets, which is a possible solution to generate data for low-resource tasks. In this paper, we investigate the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating synthetic documents to train an IR system for a Personalized Community Question Answering task. To study the effectiveness of IR models fine-tuned on LLM-generated data, we introduce a new dataset, named Sy-SE-PQA. We build Sy-SE-PQA based on an existing dataset, SE-PQA, which consists of questions and answers posted on the popular StackExchange communities. Starting from questions in SE-PQA, we generate synthetic answers using different prompt techniques and LLMs. Our findings suggest that LLMs have high potential in generating data tailored to users' needs. The synthetic data can replace human-written training data, even if the generated data may contain incorrect information.

Electronic health records contain an enormous amount of valuable information, but many are recorded in free text. Information extraction is the strategy to transform the sequence of characters into structured data, which can be employed for secondary analysis. However, the traditional information extraction components, such as named entity recognition and relation extraction, require annotated data to optimize the model parameters, which has become one of the major bottlenecks in building information extraction systems. With the large language models achieving good performances on various downstream NLP tasks without parameter tuning, it becomes possible to use large language models for zero-shot information extraction. In this study, we aim to explore whether the most popular large language model, ChatGPT, can extract useful information from the radiological reports. We first design the prompt template for the interested information in the CT reports. Then, we generate the prompts by combining the prompt template with the CT reports as the inputs of ChatGPT to obtain the responses. A post-processing module is developed to transform the responses into structured extraction results. We conducted the experiments with 847 CT reports collected from Peking University Cancer Hospital. The experimental results indicate that ChatGPT can achieve competitive performances for some extraction tasks compared with the baseline information extraction system, but some limitations need to be further improved.

The Conversational Assistance Track (CAsT) is a new track for TREC 2019 to facilitate Conversational Information Seeking (CIS) research and to create a large-scale reusable test collection for conversational search systems. The document corpus is 38,426,252 passages from the TREC Complex Answer Retrieval (CAR) and Microsoft MAchine Reading COmprehension (MARCO) datasets. Eighty information seeking dialogues (30 train, 50 test) are an average of 9 to 10 questions long. Relevance assessments are provided for 30 training topics and 20 test topics. This year 21 groups submitted a total of 65 runs using varying methods for conversational query understanding and ranking. Methods include traditional retrieval based methods, feature based learning-to-rank, neural models, and knowledge enhanced methods. A common theme through the runs is the use of BERT-based neural reranking methods. Leading methods also employed document expansion, conversational query expansion, and generative language models for conversational query rewriting (GPT-2). The results show a gap between automatic systems and those using the manually resolved utterances, with a 35% relative improvement of manual rewrites over the best automatic system.

Language Models (LMs) often cannot be deployed because of their potential to harm users in hard-to-predict ways. Prior work identifies harmful behaviors before deployment by using human annotators to hand-write test cases. However, human annotation is expensive, limiting the number and diversity of test cases. In this work, we automatically find cases where a target LM behaves in a harmful way, by generating test cases ("red teaming") using another LM. We evaluate the target LM's replies to generated test questions using a classifier trained to detect offensive content, uncovering tens of thousands of offensive replies in a 280B parameter LM chatbot. We explore several methods, from zero-shot generation to reinforcement learning, for generating test cases with varying levels of diversity and difficulty. Furthermore, we use prompt engineering to control LM-generated test cases to uncover a variety of other harms, automatically finding groups of people that the chatbot discusses in offensive ways, personal and hospital phone numbers generated as the chatbot's own contact info, leakage of private training data in generated text, and harms that occur over the course of a conversation. Overall, LM-based red teaming is one promising tool (among many needed) for finding and fixing diverse, undesirable LM behaviors before impacting users.

Discussion and debate among Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained considerable attention due to their potential to enhance the reasoning ability of LLMs. Although natural language is an obvious choice for communication due to LLM's language understanding capability, the token sampling step needed when generating natural language poses a potential risk of information loss, as it uses only one token to represent the model's belief across the entire vocabulary. In this paper, we introduce a communication regime named CIPHER (Communicative Inter-Model Protocol Through Embedding Representation) to address this issue. Specifically, we remove the token sampling step from LLMs and let them communicate their beliefs across the vocabulary through the expectation of the raw transformer output embeddings. Remarkably, by deviating from natural language, CIPHER offers an advantage of encoding a broader spectrum of information without any modification to the model weights, outperforming the state-of-the-art LLM debate methods using natural language by 0.5-5.0% across five reasoning tasks and multiple open-source LLMs of varying sizes. This showcases the superiority and robustness of embeddings as an alternative "language" for communication among LLMs. We anticipate that CIPHER will inspire further exploration for the design of interactions within LLM agent systems, offering a new direction that could significantly influence future developments in the field.

Text retrieval is a long-standing research topic on information seeking, where a system is required to return relevant information resources to user's queries in natural language. From classic retrieval methods to learning-based ranking functions, the underlying retrieval models have been continually evolved with the ever-lasting technical innovation. To design effective retrieval models, a key point lies in how to learn the text representation and model the relevance matching. The recent success of pretrained language models (PLMs) sheds light on developing more capable text retrieval approaches by leveraging the excellent modeling capacity of PLMs. With powerful PLMs, we can effectively learn the representations of queries and texts in the latent representation space, and further construct the semantic matching function between the dense vectors for relevance modeling. Such a retrieval approach is referred to as dense retrieval, since it employs dense vectors (a.k.a., embeddings) to represent the texts. Considering the rapid progress on dense retrieval, in this survey, we systematically review the recent advances on PLM-based dense retrieval. Different from previous surveys on dense retrieval, we take a new perspective to organize the related work by four major aspects, including architecture, training, indexing and integration, and summarize the mainstream techniques for each aspect. We thoroughly survey the literature, and include 300+ related reference papers on dense retrieval. To support our survey, we create a website for providing useful resources, and release a code repertory and toolkit for implementing dense retrieval models. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive, practical reference focused on the major progress for dense text retrieval.

Enterprise chatbots, powered by generative AI, are emerging as key applications to enhance employee productivity. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Large Language Models (LLMs), and orchestration frameworks like Langchain and Llamaindex are crucial for building these chatbots. However, creating effective enterprise chatbots is challenging and requires meticulous RAG pipeline engineering. This includes fine-tuning embeddings and LLMs, extracting documents from vector databases, rephrasing queries, reranking results, designing prompts, honoring document access controls, providing concise responses, including references, safeguarding personal information, and building orchestration agents. We present a framework for building RAG-based chatbots based on our experience with three NVIDIA chatbots: for IT/HR benefits, financial earnings, and general content. Our contributions are three-fold: introducing the FACTS framework (Freshness, Architectures, Cost, Testing, Security), presenting fifteen RAG pipeline control points, and providing empirical results on accuracy-latency tradeoffs between large and small LLMs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper of its kind that provides a holistic view of the factors as well as solutions for building secure enterprise-grade chatbots."

Without writing a single line of code by a human, an example Monte Carlo simulation based application for stochastic dependence modeling with copulas is developed using a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) fine-tuned for conversations. This includes interaction with ChatGPT in natural language and using mathematical formalism, which, under careful supervision by a human-expert, led to producing a working code in MATLAB, Python and R for sampling from a given copula model, evaluation of the model's density, performing maximum likelihood estimation, optimizing the code for parallel computing for CPUs as well as for GPUs, and visualization of the computed results. In contrast to other emerging studies that assess the accuracy of LLMs like ChatGPT on tasks from a selected area, this work rather investigates ways how to achieve a successful solution of a standard statistical task in a collaboration of a human-expert and artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly, through careful prompt engineering, we separate successful solutions generated by ChatGPT from unsuccessful ones, resulting in a comprehensive list of related pros and cons. It is demonstrated that if the typical pitfalls are avoided, we can substantially benefit from collaborating with an AI partner. For example, we show that if ChatGPT is not able to provide a correct solution due to a lack of or incorrect knowledge, the human-expert can feed it with the correct knowledge, e.g., in the form of mathematical theorems and formulas, and make it to apply the gained knowledge in order to provide a solution that is correct. Such ability presents an attractive opportunity to achieve a programmed solution even for users with rather limited knowledge of programming techniques.

The rise in popularity of ChatGPT and GPT-4 has significantly accelerated the development of large models, leading to the creation of numerous impressive large language models(LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). These cutting-edge models owe their remarkable performance to high-quality data. However, the details of the training data used in leading paradigms are often kept confidential. This lack of transparency, coupled with the scarcity of open-source data, impedes further developments within the community. As a response, this paper presents "Wan Juan", a large-scale multimodal dataset composed of both Chinese and English data, collected from a wide range of web sources. The dataset incorporates text, image-text, and video modalities, with a total volume exceeding 2TB. It was utilized in the training of InternLM, a model that demonstrated significant advantages in multi-dimensional evaluations when compared to models of a similar scale. All data can be accessed at https://opendatalab.org.cn/WanJuan1.0.

Large Language Models (LLMs), with their flexible generation abilities, can be powerful data sources in domains with few or no available corpora. However, problems like hallucinations and biases limit such applications. In this case study, we pick nutrition counselling, a domain lacking any public resource, and show that high-quality datasets can be gathered by combining LLMs, crowd-workers and nutrition experts. We first crowd-source and cluster a novel dataset of diet-related issues, then work with experts to prompt ChatGPT into producing related supportive text. Finally, we let the experts evaluate the safety of the generated text. We release HAI-coaching, the first expert-annotated nutrition counselling dataset containing ~2.4K dietary struggles from crowd workers, and ~97K related supportive texts generated by ChatGPT. Extensive analysis shows that ChatGPT while producing highly fluent and human-like text, also manifests harmful behaviours, especially in sensitive topics like mental health, making it unsuitable for unsupervised use.

This work introduces LAB (Large-scale Alignment for chatBots), a novel methodology designed to overcome the scalability challenges in the instruction-tuning phase of large language model (LLM) training. Leveraging a taxonomy-guided synthetic data generation process and a multi-phase tuning framework, LAB significantly reduces reliance on expensive human annotations and proprietary models like GPT-4. We demonstrate that LAB-trained models can achieve competitive performance across several benchmarks compared to models trained with traditional human-annotated or GPT-4 generated synthetic data. Thus offering a scalable, cost-effective solution for enhancing LLM capabilities and instruction-following behaviors without the drawbacks of catastrophic forgetting, marking a step forward in the efficient training of LLMs for a wide range of applications.

Chatbots such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT are now serving millions of users. Despite their widespread use, there remains a lack of public datasets showcasing how these tools are used by a population of users in practice. To bridge this gap, we offered free access to ChatGPT for online users in exchange for their affirmative, consensual opt-in to anonymously collect their chat transcripts and request headers. From this, we compiled WildChat, a corpus of 1 million user-ChatGPT conversations, which consists of over 2.5 million interaction turns. We compare WildChat with other popular user-chatbot interaction datasets, and find that our dataset offers the most diverse user prompts, contains the largest number of languages, and presents the richest variety of potentially toxic use-cases for researchers to study. In addition to timestamped chat transcripts, we enrich the dataset with demographic data, including state, country, and hashed IP addresses, alongside request headers. This augmentation allows for more detailed analysis of user behaviors across different geographical regions and temporal dimensions. Finally, because it captures a broad range of use cases, we demonstrate the dataset's potential utility in fine-tuning instruction-following models. WildChat is released at https://wildchat.allen.ai under AI2 ImpACT Licenses.

We introduce the StatCan Dialogue Dataset consisting of 19,379 conversation turns between agents working at Statistics Canada and online users looking for published data tables. The conversations stem from genuine intents, are held in English or French, and lead to agents retrieving one of over 5000 complex data tables. Based on this dataset, we propose two tasks: (1) automatic retrieval of relevant tables based on a on-going conversation, and (2) automatic generation of appropriate agent responses at each turn. We investigate the difficulty of each task by establishing strong baselines. Our experiments on a temporal data split reveal that all models struggle to generalize to future conversations, as we observe a significant drop in performance across both tasks when we move from the validation to the test set. In addition, we find that response generation models struggle to decide when to return a table. Considering that the tasks pose significant challenges to existing models, we encourage the community to develop models for our task, which can be directly used to help knowledge workers find relevant tables for live chat users.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with capabilities like In-Context Learning (ICL) has ushered in new possibilities for data generation across various domains while minimizing the need for extensive data collection and modeling techniques. Researchers have explored ways to use this generated synthetic data to optimize smaller student models for reduced deployment costs and lower latency in downstream tasks. However, ICL-generated data often suffers from low quality as the task specificity is limited with few examples used in ICL. In this paper, we propose GeMQuAD - a semi-supervised learning approach, extending the WeakDAP framework, applied to a dataset generated through ICL with just one example in the target language using AlexaTM 20B Seq2Seq LLM. Through our approach, we iteratively identify high-quality data to enhance model performance, especially for low-resource multilingual setting in the context of Extractive Question Answering task. Our framework outperforms the machine translation-augmented model by 0.22/1.68 F1/EM (Exact Match) points for Hindi and 0.82/1.37 F1/EM points for Spanish on the MLQA dataset, and it surpasses the performance of model trained on an English-only dataset by 5.05/6.50 F1/EM points for Hindi and 3.81/3.69 points F1/EM for Spanish on the same dataset. Notably, our approach uses a pre-trained LLM for generation with no fine-tuning (FT), utilizing just a single annotated example in ICL to generate data, providing a cost-effective development process.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have quickly become an invaluable assistant for a variety of tasks. However, their effectiveness is constrained by their ability to tailor responses to human preferences and behaviors via personalization. Prior work in LLM personalization has largely focused on style transfer or incorporating small factoids about the user, as knowledge injection remains an open challenge. In this paper, we explore injecting knowledge of prior conversations into LLMs to enable future work on less redundant, personalized conversations. We identify two real-world constraints: (1) conversations are sequential in time and must be treated as such during training, and (2) per-user personalization is only viable in parameter-efficient settings. To this aim, we propose PLUM, a pipeline performing data augmentation for up-sampling conversations as question-answer pairs, that are then used to finetune a low-rank adaptation adapter with a weighted cross entropy loss. Even in this first exploration of the problem, we perform competitively with baselines such as RAG, attaining an accuracy of 81.5% across 100 conversations.

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, are versatile and can solve different tasks due to their emergent ability and generalizability. However, LLMs sometimes lack domain-specific knowledge to perform tasks, which would also cause hallucination during inference. In some previous works, additional modules like graph neural networks (GNNs) are trained on retrieved knowledge from external knowledge bases, aiming to mitigate the problem of lacking domain-specific knowledge. However, incorporating additional modules: 1) would need retraining additional modules when encountering novel domains; 2) would become a bottleneck since LLMs' strong abilities are not fully utilized for retrieval. In this paper, we propose a paradigm, termed Knowledge Solver (KSL), to teach LLMs to search for essential knowledge from external knowledge bases by harnessing their own strong generalizability. Specifically, we design a simple yet effective prompt to transform retrieval into a multi-hop decision sequence, which empowers LLMs with searching knowledge ability in zero-shot manner. Additionally, KSL is able to provide complete retrieval paths and therefore increase explainability of LLMs' reasoning processes. We conduct experiments on three datasets: CommonsenseQA, OpenbookQA, and MedQA-USMLE, and found that our approach improves LLM baseline performance by a relatively large margin.

In this paper, we study how open-source large language models (LLMs) can be effectively deployed for improving query rewriting in conversational search, especially for ambiguous queries. We introduce CHIQ, a two-step method that leverages the capabilities of LLMs to resolve ambiguities in the conversation history before query rewriting. This approach contrasts with prior studies that predominantly use closed-source LLMs to directly generate search queries from conversation history. We demonstrate on five well-established benchmarks that CHIQ leads to state-of-the-art results across most settings, showing highly competitive performances with systems leveraging closed-source LLMs. Our study provides a first step towards leveraging open-source LLMs in conversational search, as a competitive alternative to the prevailing reliance on commercial LLMs. Data, models, and source code will be publicly available upon acceptance at https://github.com/fengranMark/CHIQ.

Retrieval-augmented language models (RaLM) have demonstrated the potential to solve knowledge-intensive natural language processing (NLP) tasks by combining a non-parametric knowledge base with a parametric language model. Instead of fine-tuning a fully parametric model, RaLM excels at its low-cost adaptation to the latest data and better source attribution mechanisms. Among various RaLM approaches, iterative RaLM delivers a better generation quality due to a more frequent interaction between the retriever and the language model. Despite the benefits, iterative RaLM usually encounters high overheads due to the frequent retrieval step. To this end, we propose RaLMSpec, a speculation-inspired framework that provides generic speed-up over iterative RaLM while preserving the same model outputs through speculative retrieval and batched verification. By further incorporating prefetching, optimal speculation stride scheduler, and asynchronous verification, RaLMSpec can automatically exploit the acceleration potential to the fullest. For naive iterative RaLM serving, extensive evaluations over three language models on four downstream QA datasets demonstrate that RaLMSpec can achieve a speed-up ratio of 1.75-2.39x, 1.04-1.39x, and 1.31-1.77x when the retriever is an exact dense retriever, approximate dense retriever, and sparse retriever respectively compared with the baseline. For KNN-LM serving, RaLMSpec can achieve a speed-up ratio up to 7.59x and 2.45x when the retriever is an exact dense retriever and approximate dense retriever, respectively, compared with the baseline.