Daily Papers

There have been various types of pretraining architectures including autoencoding models (e.g., BERT), autoregressive models (e.g., GPT), and encoder-decoder models (e.g., T5). However, none of the pretraining frameworks performs the best for all tasks of three main categories including natural language understanding (NLU), unconditional generation, and conditional generation. We propose a General Language Model (GLM) based on autoregressive blank infilling to address this challenge. GLM improves blank filling pretraining by adding 2D positional encodings and allowing an arbitrary order to predict spans, which results in performance gains over BERT and T5 on NLU tasks. Meanwhile, GLM can be pretrained for different types of tasks by varying the number and lengths of blanks. On a wide range of tasks across NLU, conditional and unconditional generation, GLM outperforms BERT, T5, and GPT given the same model sizes and data, and achieves the best performance from a single pretrained model with 1.25x parameters of BERT Large , demonstrating its generalizability to different downstream tasks.

We present WebGLM, a web-enhanced question-answering system based on the General Language Model (GLM). Its goal is to augment a pre-trained large language model (LLM) with web search and retrieval capabilities while being efficient for real-world deployments. To achieve this, we develop WebGLM with strategies for the LLM-augmented retriever, bootstrapped generator, and human preference-aware scorer. Specifically, we identify and address the limitations of WebGPT (OpenAI), through which WebGLM is enabled with accuracy, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness advantages. In addition, we propose systematic criteria for evaluating web-enhanced QA systems. We conduct multi-dimensional human evaluation and quantitative ablation studies, which suggest the outperformance of the proposed WebGLM designs over existing systems. WebGLM with the 10-billion-parameter GLM (10B) is shown to perform better than the similar-sized WebGPT (13B) and even comparably to WebGPT (175B) in human evaluation. The code, demo, and data are at https://github.com/THUDM/WebGLM.

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 HF中国镜像站 in the year 2023 alone. The open models can be accessed through https://github.com/THUDM and https://huggingface.co/THUDM.

Recent advancements in Generative Language Models (GLMs) have transformed Natural Language Processing (NLP) by showcasing the effectiveness of the "pre-train, prompt, and predict" paradigm in utilizing pre-trained GLM knowledge for diverse applications. Despite their potential, these capabilities lack adequate quantitative characterization due to the absence of comprehensive benchmarks, particularly for low-resource languages. Existing low-resource benchmarks focus on discriminative language models like BERT, neglecting the evaluation of generative language models. Moreover, current benchmarks often overlook measuring generalization performance across multiple tasks, a crucial metric for GLMs. To bridge these gaps, we introduce NLEBench, a comprehensive benchmark tailored for evaluating natural language generation capabilities in Norwegian, a low-resource language. We use Norwegian as a case study to explore whether current GLMs and benchmarks in mainstream languages like English can reveal the unique characteristics of underrepresented languages. NLEBench encompasses a suite of real-world NLP tasks ranging from news storytelling, summarization, open-domain conversation, natural language understanding, instruction fine-tuning, toxicity and bias evaluation, to self-curated Chain-of-Thought investigation. It features two high-quality, human-annotated datasets: an instruction dataset covering traditional Norwegian cultures, idioms, slang, and special expressions, and a document-grounded multi-label dataset for topic classification, question answering, and summarization. This paper also introduces foundational Norwegian Generative Language Models (NorGLMs) developed with diverse parameter scales and Transformer-based architectures. Systematic evaluations on the proposed benchmark suite provide insights into the capabilities and scalability of NorGLMs across various downstream tasks.

While Language Models have become workhorses for NLP, their interplay with textual knowledge graphs (KGs) - structured memories of general or domain knowledge - is actively researched. Current embedding methodologies for such graphs typically either (i) linearize graphs for embedding them using sequential Language Models (LMs), which underutilize structural information, or (ii) use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to preserve graph structure, while GNNs cannot represent textual features as well as a pre-trained LM could. In this work we introduce a novel language model, the Graph Language Model (GLM), that integrates the strengths of both approaches, while mitigating their weaknesses. The GLM parameters are initialized from a pretrained LM, to facilitate nuanced understanding of individual concepts and triplets. Simultaneously, its architectural design incorporates graph biases, thereby promoting effective knowledge distribution within the graph. Empirical evaluations on relation classification tasks on ConceptNet subgraphs reveal that GLM embeddings surpass both LM- and GNN-based baselines in supervised and zero-shot settings.

Current research on generative language models (GLMs) for automated text scoring (ATS) has focused almost exclusively on querying proprietary models via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Yet such practices raise issues around transparency and security, and these methods offer little in the way of efficiency or customizability. With the recent proliferation of smaller, open-source models, there is the option to explore GLMs with computers equipped with modest, consumer-grade hardware, that is, for the "GPU poor." In this study, we analyze the performance and efficiency of open-source, small-scale GLMs for ATS. Results show that GLMs can be fine-tuned to achieve adequate, though not state-of-the-art, performance. In addition to ATS, we take small steps towards analyzing models' capacity for generating feedback by prompting GLMs to explain their scores. Model-generated feedback shows promise, but requires more rigorous evaluation focused on targeted use cases.

We introduce GLM-130B, a bilingual (English and Chinese) pre-trained language model with 130 billion parameters. It is an attempt to open-source a 100B-scale model at least as good as GPT-3 and unveil how models of such a scale can be successfully pre-trained. Over the course of this effort, we face numerous unexpected technical and engineering challenges, particularly on loss spikes and disconvergence. In this paper, we introduce the training process of GLM-130B including its design choices, training strategies for both efficiency and stability, and engineering efforts. The resultant GLM-130B model offers significant outperformance over GPT-3 175B on a wide range of popular English benchmarks while the performance advantage is not observed in OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B. It also consistently and significantly outperforms ERNIE TITAN 3.0 260B -- the largest Chinese language model -- across related benchmarks. Finally, we leverage a unique scaling property of GLM-130B to reach INT4 quantization, without quantization aware training and with almost no performance loss, making it the first among 100B-scale models. More importantly, the property allows its effective inference on 4timesRTX 3090 (24G) or 8timesRTX 2080 Ti (11G) GPUs, the most ever affordable GPUs required for using 100B-scale models. The GLM-130B model weights are publicly accessible and its code, training logs, related toolkit, and lessons learned are open-sourced at https://github.com/THUDM/GLM-130B .

Scaling language models with more data, compute and parameters has driven significant progress in natural language processing. For example, thanks to scaling, GPT-3 was able to achieve strong results on in-context learning tasks. However, training these large dense models requires significant amounts of computing resources. In this paper, we propose and develop a family of language models named GLaM (Generalist Language Model), which uses a sparsely activated mixture-of-experts architecture to scale the model capacity while also incurring substantially less training cost compared to dense variants. The largest GLaM has 1.2 trillion parameters, which is approximately 7x larger than GPT-3. It consumes only 1/3 of the energy used to train GPT-3 and requires half of the computation flops for inference, while still achieving better overall zero-shot and one-shot performance across 29 NLP tasks.

We present GLM-Dialog, a large-scale language model (LLM) with 10B parameters capable of knowledge-grounded conversation in Chinese using a search engine to access the Internet knowledge. GLM-Dialog offers a series of applicable techniques for exploiting various external knowledge including both helpful and noisy knowledge, enabling the creation of robust knowledge-grounded dialogue LLMs with limited proper datasets. To evaluate the GLM-Dialog more fairly, we also propose a novel evaluation method to allow humans to converse with multiple deployed bots simultaneously and compare their performance implicitly instead of explicitly rating using multidimensional metrics.Comprehensive evaluations from automatic to human perspective demonstrate the advantages of GLM-Dialog comparing with existing open source Chinese dialogue models. We release both the model checkpoint and source code, and also deploy it as a WeChat application to interact with users. We offer our evaluation platform online in an effort to prompt the development of open source models and reliable dialogue evaluation systems. The additional easy-to-use toolkit that consists of short text entity linking, query generation, and helpful knowledge classification is also released to enable diverse applications. All the source code is available on Github.

Universally modeling all typical information extraction tasks (UIE) with one generative language model (GLM) has revealed great potential by the latest study, where various IE predictions are unified into a linearized hierarchical expression under a GLM. Syntactic structure information, a type of effective feature which has been extensively utilized in IE community, should also be beneficial to UIE. In this work, we propose a novel structure-aware GLM, fully unleashing the power of syntactic knowledge for UIE. A heterogeneous structure inductor is explored to unsupervisedly induce rich heterogeneous structural representations by post-training an existing GLM. In particular, a structural broadcaster is devised to compact various latent trees into explicit high-order forests, helping to guide a better generation during decoding. We finally introduce a task-oriented structure fine-tuning mechanism, further adjusting the learned structures to most coincide with the end-task's need. Over 12 IE benchmarks across 7 tasks our system shows significant improvements over the baseline UIE system. Further in-depth analyses show that our GLM learns rich task-adaptive structural bias that greatly resolves the UIE crux, the long-range dependence issue and boundary identifying. Source codes are open at https://github.com/ChocoWu/LasUIE.

The potential of large language models (LLMs) to simultaneously perform a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks has been the subject of extensive research. Although instruction tuning has proven to be a data-efficient method for transforming LLMs into such generalist models, their performance still lags behind specialist models trained exclusively for specific tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether incorporating broad-coverage generalist instruction tuning can contribute to building a specialist model. We hypothesize that its efficacy depends on task specificity and skill requirements. Our experiments assess four target tasks with distinct coverage levels, revealing that integrating generalist instruction tuning consistently enhances model performance when the task coverage is broad. The effect is particularly pronounced when the amount of task-specific training data is limited. Further investigation into three target tasks focusing on different capabilities demonstrates that generalist instruction tuning improves understanding and reasoning abilities. However, for tasks requiring factual knowledge, generalist data containing hallucinatory information may negatively affect the model's performance. Overall, our work provides a systematic guide for developing specialist models with general instruction tuning. Our code and other related resources can be found at https://github.com/DavidFanzz/Generalist_or_Specialist.

Previous studies have typically assumed that large language models are unable to accurately perform arithmetic operations, particularly multiplication of >8 digits, and operations involving decimals and fractions, without the use of calculator tools. This paper aims to challenge this misconception. With sufficient training data, a 2 billion-parameter language model can accurately perform multi-digit arithmetic operations with almost 100% accuracy without data leakage, significantly surpassing GPT-4 (whose multi-digit multiplication accuracy is only 4.3%). We also demonstrate that our MathGLM, fine-tuned from GLM-10B on a dataset with additional multi-step arithmetic operations and math problems described in text, achieves similar performance to GPT-4 on a 5,000-samples Chinese math problem test set.

Generative Language Models (GLMs) have shown impressive performance in tasks such as text generation, understanding, and reasoning. However, the large model size poses challenges for practical deployment. To solve this problem, Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) has become increasingly popular. However, current QAT methods for generative models have resulted in a noticeable loss of accuracy. To counteract this issue, we propose a novel knowledge distillation method specifically designed for GLMs. Our method, called token-scaled logit distillation, prevents overfitting and provides superior learning from the teacher model and ground truth. This research marks the first evaluation of ternary weight quantization-aware training of large-scale GLMs with less than 1.0 degradation in perplexity and no loss of accuracy in a reasoning task.

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.

Significant advancements has recently been achieved in the field of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), demonstrating their remarkable capabilities in understanding and reasoning across diverse tasks. However, these models are often trained for specific tasks and rely on task-specific input-output formats, limiting their applicability to a broader range of tasks. This raises a fundamental question: Can we develop a unified approach to represent and handle different multi-modal tasks to maximize the generalizability of MLLMs? In this paper, we propose UnifiedMLLM, a comprehensive model designed to represent various tasks using a unified representation. Our model exhibits strong capabilities in comprehending the implicit intent of user instructions and preforming reasoning. In addition to generating textual responses, our model also outputs task tokens and grounding tokens, serving as indicators of task types and task granularity. These outputs are subsequently routed through the task router and directed to specific expert models for task completion. To train our model, we construct a task-specific dataset and an 100k multi-task dataset encompassing complex scenarios. Employing a three-stage training strategy, we equip our model with robust reasoning and task processing capabilities while preserving its generalization capacity and knowledge reservoir. Extensive experiments showcase the impressive performance of our unified representation approach across various tasks, surpassing existing methodologies. Furthermore, our approach exhibits exceptional scalability and generality. Our code, model, and dataset will be available at https://github.com/lzw-lzw/UnifiedMLLM.

Automated Short Answer Scoring (ASAS) is a critical component in educational assessment. While traditional ASAS systems relied on rule-based algorithms or complex deep learning methods, recent advancements in Generative Language Models (GLMs) offer new opportunities for improvement. This study explores the application of GLMs to ASAS, leveraging their off-the-shelf capabilities and performance in various domains. We propose a novel pipeline that combines vector databases, transformer-based encoders, and GLMs to enhance short answer scoring accuracy. Our approach stores training responses in a vector database, retrieves semantically similar responses during inference, and employs a GLM to analyze these responses and determine appropriate scores. We further optimize the system through fine-tuned retrieval processes and prompt engineering. Evaluation on the SemEval 2013 dataset demonstrates a significant improvement on the SCIENTSBANK 3-way and 2-way tasks compared to existing methods, highlighting the potential of GLMs in advancing ASAS technology.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable generalization capability with exceptional performance in various language modeling tasks. However, they still exhibit inherent limitations in precisely capturing and returning grounded knowledge. While existing work has explored utilizing knowledge graphs to enhance language modeling via joint training and customized model architectures, applying this to LLMs is problematic owing to their large number of parameters and high computational cost. In addition, how to leverage the pre-trained LLMs and avoid training a customized model from scratch remains an open question. In this work, we propose Graph Neural Prompting (GNP), a novel plug-and-play method to assist pre-trained LLMs in learning beneficial knowledge from KGs. GNP encompasses various designs, including a standard graph neural network encoder, a cross-modality pooling module, a domain projector, and a self-supervised link prediction objective. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the superiority of GNP on both commonsense and biomedical reasoning tasks across different LLM sizes and settings.

Generalization is arguably the most important goal of statistical language modeling research. Publicly available benchmarks and papers published with an open-source code have been critical to advancing the field. However, it is often very difficult, and sometimes even impossible, to reproduce the results fully as reported in publications. In this paper, we propose a simple framework that should help advance the state of the art in language modeling in terms of generalization. We propose to publish not just the code, but also probabilities on dev and test sets with future publications so that one can easily add the new model into an ensemble. This has crucial advantages: it is much easier to determine whether a newly proposed model is actually complementary to the current baseline. Therefore, instead of inventing new names for the old tricks, the scientific community can advance faster. Finally, this approach promotes diversity of ideas: one does not need to create an individual model that is the new state of the art to attract attention; it will be sufficient to develop a new model that learns patterns which other models do not. Thus, even a suboptimal model can be found to have value. Remarkably, our approach has yielded new state-of-the-art results across various language modeling benchmarks up to 10%.

Large language models (LLMs) are a special class of pretrained language models obtained by scaling model size, pretraining corpus and computation. LLMs, because of their large size and pretraining on large volumes of text data, exhibit special abilities which allow them to achieve remarkable performances without any task-specific training in many of the natural language processing tasks. The era of LLMs started with OpenAI GPT-3 model, and the popularity of LLMs is increasing exponentially after the introduction of models like ChatGPT and GPT4. We refer to GPT-3 and its successor OpenAI models, including ChatGPT and GPT4, as GPT-3 family large language models (GLLMs). With the ever-rising popularity of GLLMs, especially in the research community, there is a strong need for a comprehensive survey which summarizes the recent research progress in multiple dimensions and can guide the research community with insightful future research directions. We start the survey paper with foundation concepts like transformers, transfer learning, self-supervised learning, pretrained language models and large language models. We then present a brief overview of GLLMs and discuss the performances of GLLMs in various downstream tasks, specific domains and multiple languages. We also discuss the data labelling and data augmentation abilities of GLLMs, the robustness of GLLMs, the effectiveness of GLLMs as evaluators, and finally, conclude with multiple insightful future research directions. To summarize, this comprehensive survey paper will serve as a good resource for both academic and industry people to stay updated with the latest research related to GPT-3 family large language models.

The NLP community has mainly focused on scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) vertically, i.e., making them better for about 100 languages. We instead scale LLMs horizontally: we create, through continued pretraining, Glot500-m, an LLM that covers 511 languages, almost all of them low-resource. An important part of this effort is to collect and clean Glot500-c, a corpus that covers these 511 languages and allows us to train Glot500-m. We evaluate Glot500-m on five diverse tasks across these languages. We observe large improvements for both high-resource and lowresource languages compared to an XLM-R baseline. Our analysis shows that no single factor explains the quality of multilingual LLM representations. Rather, a combination of factors determines quality including corpus size, script, "help" from related languages and the total capacity of the model. Our work addresses an important goal of NLP research: we should not limit NLP to a small fraction of the world's languages and instead strive to support as many languages as possible to bring the benefits of NLP technology to all languages and cultures. Code, data and models are available at https://github.com/cisnlp/Glot500.

Multilingual Large Language Models are capable of using powerful Large Language Models to handle and respond to queries in multiple languages, which achieves remarkable success in multilingual natural language processing tasks. Despite these breakthroughs, there still remains a lack of a comprehensive survey to summarize existing approaches and recent developments in this field. To this end, in this paper, we present a thorough review and provide a unified perspective to summarize the recent progress as well as emerging trends in multilingual large language models (MLLMs) literature. The contributions of this paper can be summarized: (1) First survey: to our knowledge, we take the first step and present a thorough review in MLLMs research field according to multi-lingual alignment; (2) New taxonomy: we offer a new and unified perspective to summarize the current progress of MLLMs; (3) New frontiers: we highlight several emerging frontiers and discuss the corresponding challenges; (4) Abundant resources: we collect abundant open-source resources, including relevant papers, data corpora, and leaderboards. We hope our work can provide the community with quick access and spur breakthrough research in MLLMs.

Pretrained language models have become the standard approach for many NLP tasks due to strong performance, but they are very expensive to train. We propose a simple and efficient learning framework, TLM, that does not rely on large-scale pretraining. Given some labeled task data and a large general corpus, TLM uses task data as queries to retrieve a tiny subset of the general corpus and jointly optimizes the task objective and the language modeling objective from scratch. On eight classification datasets in four domains, TLM achieves results better than or similar to pretrained language models (e.g., RoBERTa-Large) while reducing the training FLOPs by two orders of magnitude. With high accuracy and efficiency, we hope TLM will contribute to democratizing NLP and expediting its development.

We introduce DataComp for Language Models (DCLM), a testbed for controlled dataset experiments with the goal of improving language models. As part of DCLM, we provide a standardized corpus of 240T tokens extracted from Common Crawl, effective pretraining recipes based on the OpenLM framework, and a broad suite of 53 downstream evaluations. Participants in the DCLM benchmark can experiment with data curation strategies such as deduplication, filtering, and data mixing at model scales ranging from 412M to 7B parameters. As a baseline for DCLM, we conduct extensive experiments and find that model-based filtering is key to assembling a high-quality training set. The resulting dataset, DCLM-Baseline enables training a 7B parameter language model from scratch to 64% 5-shot accuracy on MMLU with 2.6T training tokens. Compared to MAP-Neo, the previous state-of-the-art in open-data language models, DCLM-Baseline represents a 6.6 percentage point improvement on MMLU while being trained with 40% less compute. Our baseline model is also comparable to Mistral-7B-v0.3 and Llama 3 8B on MMLU (63% & 66%), and performs similarly on an average of 53 natural language understanding tasks while being trained with 6.6x less compute than Llama 3 8B. Our results highlight the importance of dataset design for training language models and offer a starting point for further research on data curation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a significant stride toward Artificial General Intelligence. As scaling laws underscore the potential of increasing model sizes, the academic community has intensified its investigations into LLMs with capacities exceeding 50 billion parameters. This technical report builds on our prior work with Tele-FLM (also known as FLM-2), a publicly available 52-billion-parameter model. We delve into two primary areas: we first discuss our observation of Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) on Tele-FLM-52B, which supports the "less is more" approach for SFT data construction; second, we demonstrate our experiments and analyses on the best practices for progressively growing a model from 52 billion to 102 billion, and subsequently to 1 trillion parameters. We will open-source a 1T model checkpoint, namely Tele-FLM-1T, to advance further training and research.

The need for large text corpora has increased with the advent of pretrained language models and, in particular, the discovery of scaling laws for these models. Most available corpora have sufficient data only for languages with large dominant communities. However, there is no corpus available that (i) covers a wide range of minority languages; (ii) is generated by an open-source reproducible pipeline; and (iii) is rigorously cleaned from noise, making it trustworthy to use. We present GlotCC, a clean, document-level, 2TB general domain corpus derived from CommonCrawl, covering more than 1000 languages. We make GlotCC and the system used to generate it - including the pipeline, language identification model, and filters - available to the research community. Corpus v. 1.0 https://huggingface.co/datasets/cis-lmu/GlotCC-v1, Pipeline v. 3.0 https://github.com/cisnlp/GlotCC.

Uncertainty learning and quantification of models are crucial tasks to enhance the trustworthiness of the models. Importantly, the recent surge of generative language models (GLMs) emphasizes the need for reliable uncertainty quantification due to the concerns on generating hallucinated facts. In this paper, we propose to learn neural prediction set models that comes with the probably approximately correct (PAC) guarantee for quantifying the uncertainty of GLMs. Unlike existing prediction set models, which are parameterized by a scalar value, we propose to parameterize prediction sets via neural networks, which achieves more precise uncertainty quantification but still satisfies the PAC guarantee. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on four types of language datasets and six types of models by showing that our method improves the quantified uncertainty by 63% on average, compared to a standard baseline method.

Information extraction tasks require both accurate, efficient, and generalisable models. Classical supervised deep learning approaches can achieve the required performance, but they need large datasets and are limited in their ability to adapt to different tasks. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate good generalization, meaning that they can adapt to many different tasks based on user requests. However, LLMs are computationally expensive and tend to fail to generate structured outputs. In this article, we will introduce a new kind of GLiNER model that can be used for various information extraction tasks while being a small encoder model. Our model achieved SoTA performance on zero-shot NER benchmarks and leading performance on question-answering, summarization and relation extraction tasks. Additionally, in this article, we will cover experimental results on self-learning approaches for named entity recognition using GLiNER models.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to significant improvements in natural language processing but also poses challenges due to their high computational and energy demands. This paper introduces a series of research efforts focused on Super Tiny Language Models (STLMs), which aim to deliver high performance with significantly reduced parameter counts. We explore innovative techniques such as byte-level tokenization with a pooling mechanism, weight tying, and efficient training strategies. These methods collectively reduce the parameter count by 90% to 95% compared to traditional models while maintaining competitive performance. This series of papers will explore into various subproblems, including tokenizer-free models, self-play based training, and alternative training objectives, targeting models with 10M, 50M, and 100M parameters. Our ultimate goal is to make high-performance language models more accessible and practical for a wide range of applications.

Recent studies report that autoregressive language models can successfully solve many NLP tasks via zero- and few-shot learning paradigms, which opens up new possibilities for using the pre-trained language models. This paper introduces two autoregressive GPT-like models with 1.3 billion and 13 billion parameters trained on 60 languages from 25 language families using Wikipedia and Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus. We reproduce the GPT-3 architecture using GPT-2 sources and the sparse attention mechanism; Deepspeed and Megatron frameworks allow us to parallelize the training and inference steps effectively. The resulting models show performance on par with the recently released XGLM models by Facebook, covering more languages and enhancing NLP possibilities for low resource languages of CIS countries and Russian small nations. We detail the motivation for the choices of the architecture design, thoroughly describe the data preparation pipeline, and train five small versions of the model to choose the most optimal multilingual tokenization strategy. We measure the model perplexity in all covered languages and evaluate it on the wide spectre of multilingual tasks, including classification, generative, sequence labeling and knowledge probing. The models were evaluated with the zero-shot and few-shot methods. Furthermore, we compared the classification tasks with the state-of-the-art multilingual model XGLM. source code and the mGPT XL model are publicly released.

Language models (LMs) are powerful tools for natural language processing, but they often struggle to produce coherent and fluent text when they are small. Models with around 125M parameters such as GPT-Neo (small) or GPT-2 (small) can rarely generate coherent and consistent English text beyond a few words even after extensive training. This raises the question of whether the emergence of the ability to produce coherent English text only occurs at larger scales (with hundreds of millions of parameters or more) and complex architectures (with many layers of global attention). In this work, we introduce TinyStories, a synthetic dataset of short stories that only contain words that a typical 3 to 4-year-olds usually understand, generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. We show that TinyStories can be used to train and evaluate LMs that are much smaller than the state-of-the-art models (below 10 million total parameters), or have much simpler architectures (with only one transformer block), yet still produce fluent and consistent stories with several paragraphs that are diverse and have almost perfect grammar, and demonstrate reasoning capabilities. We also introduce a new paradigm for the evaluation of language models: We suggest a framework which uses GPT-4 to grade the content generated by these models as if those were stories written by students and graded by a (human) teacher. This new paradigm overcomes the flaws of standard benchmarks which often requires the model's output to be very structures, and moreover provides a multidimensional score for the model, providing scores for different capabilities such as grammar, creativity and consistency. We hope that TinyStories can facilitate the development, analysis and research of LMs, especially for low-resource or specialized domains, and shed light on the emergence of language capabilities in LMs.

Multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) acquire valuable, generalizable linguistic information during pretraining and have advanced the state of the art on task-specific finetuning. To date, only ~31 out of ~2,000 African languages are covered in existing language models. We ameliorate this limitation by developing SERENGETI, a massively multilingual language model that covers 517 African languages and language varieties. We evaluate our novel models on eight natural language understanding tasks across 20 datasets, comparing to 4 mPLMs that cover 4-23 African languages. SERENGETI outperforms other models on 11 datasets across the eights tasks, achieving 82.27 average F_1. We also perform analyses of errors from our models, which allows us to investigate the influence of language genealogy and linguistic similarity when the models are applied under zero-shot settings. We will publicly release our models for research.\href{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/serengeti{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/serengeti}}

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in NLP and multimodal tasks. Despite these successes, their development faces two main challenges: (i) high computational cost; and (ii) difficulty in conducting fair and objective evaluations. LLMs are prohibitively expensive, making it feasible for only a few major players to undertake their training, thereby constraining both research and application opportunities. This underscores the importance of cost-effective LLM training. In this paper, we utilize a growth strategy to significantly reduce LLM training cost. We demonstrate that an LLM with 101B parameters and 0.31TB tokens can be trained on a 100K budget. We also adopt a systematic evaluation paradigm for the IQ evaluation of LLMs, in complement to existing evaluations that focus more on knowledge-oriented abilities. We introduce our benchmark including evaluations on important aspects of intelligence including symbolic mapping, itrule understanding, pattern mining, and anti-interference. Such evaluations minimize the potential impact of memorization. Experimental results show that our model FLM-101B, trained with a budget of 100K, achieves comparable performance to powerful and well-known models, eg GPT-3 and GLM-130B, especially in the IQ benchmark evaluations with contexts unseen in training data. The checkpoint of FLM-101B will be open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/CofeAI/FLM-101B.

Deep learning models have achieved impressive prediction performance but often sacrifice interpretability, a critical consideration in high-stakes domains such as healthcare or policymaking. In contrast, generalized additive models (GAMs) can maintain interpretability but often suffer from poor prediction performance due to their inability to effectively capture feature interactions. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by using pre-trained neural language models to extract embeddings for each input before learning a linear model in the embedding space. The final model (which we call Emb-GAM) is a transparent, linear function of its input features and feature interactions. Leveraging the language model allows Emb-GAM to learn far fewer linear coefficients, model larger interactions, and generalize well to novel inputs (e.g. unseen ngrams in text). Across a variety of natural-language-processing datasets, Emb-GAM achieves strong prediction performance without sacrificing interpretability. All code is made available on Github.

With the proliferation of open-sourced Large Language Models (LLMs) and efficient finetuning techniques, we are on the cusp of the emergence of numerous domain-specific LLMs that have been finetuned for expertise across specialized fields and applications for which the current general-purpose LLMs are unsuitable. In academia, this technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we conduct systematic literature reviews (SLRs), access knowledge and generate new insights. This paper proposes an AI-enabled methodological framework that combines the power of LLMs with the rigorous reporting guidelines of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). By finetuning LLMs on domain-specific academic papers that have been selected as a result of a rigorous SLR process, the proposed PRISMA-DFLLM (for Domain-specific Finetuned LLMs) reporting guidelines offer the potential to achieve greater efficiency, reusability and scalability, while also opening the potential for conducting incremental living systematic reviews with the aid of LLMs. Additionally, the proposed approach for leveraging LLMs for SLRs enables the dissemination of finetuned models, empowering researchers to accelerate advancements and democratize cutting-edge research. This paper presents the case for the feasibility of finetuned LLMs to support rigorous SLRs and the technical requirements for realizing this. This work then proposes the extended PRISMA-DFLLM checklist of reporting guidelines as well as the advantages, challenges, and potential implications of implementing PRISMA-DFLLM. Finally, a future research roadmap to develop this line of AI-enabled SLRs is presented, paving the way for a new era of evidence synthesis and knowledge discovery.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention due to their high performance on a wide range of natural language tasks since the release of ChatGPT. The LLMs learn to understand and generate language by training billions of model parameters on vast volumes of text data. Despite being a relatively new field, LLM research is rapidly advancing in various directions. In this paper, we present an overview of LLM families, including LLaMA, PaLM, GPT, and MoE, and the methods developed to create and enhance LLMs for official European Union (EU) languages. We provide a comprehensive summary of common monolingual and multilingual datasets used for pretraining large language models.

The recent surge in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has showcased their remarkable potential for achieving generalized intelligence by integrating visual understanding into Large Language Models.Nevertheless, the sheer model size of MLLMs leads to substantial memory and computational demands that hinder their widespread deployment. In this work, we do not propose a new efficient model structure or train small-scale MLLMs from scratch. Instead, we focus on what matters for training small-scale MLLMs through knowledge distillation, which is the first step from the multimodal distillation perspective. Our extensive studies involve training strategies, model choices, and distillation algorithms in the knowledge distillation process. These results show that joint alignment for both tokens and logit alignment plays critical roles in teacher-student frameworks. In addition, we draw a series of intriguing observations from this study. By evaluating different benchmarks and proper strategy, even a 2.7B small-scale model can perform on par with larger models with 7B or 13B parameters. Our code and models will be publicly available for further research.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of general multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, adapting general MLLMs to specific domains, such as scientific fields and industrial applications, remains less explored. This paper systematically investigates domain adaptation of MLLMs through post-training, focusing on data synthesis, training pipelines, and task evaluation. (1) Data Synthesis: Using open-source models, we develop a visual instruction synthesizer that effectively generates diverse visual instruction tasks from domain-specific image-caption pairs. Our synthetic tasks surpass those generated by manual rules, GPT-4, and GPT-4V in enhancing the domain-specific performance of MLLMs. (2) Training Pipeline: While the two-stage training--initially on image-caption pairs followed by visual instruction tasks--is commonly adopted for developing general MLLMs, we apply a single-stage training pipeline to enhance task diversity for domain-specific post-training. (3) Task Evaluation: We conduct experiments in two domains, biomedicine and food, by post-training MLLMs of different sources and scales (e.g., Qwen2-VL-2B, LLaVA-v1.6-8B, Llama-3.2-11B), and then evaluating MLLM performance on various domain-specific tasks. To support further research in MLLM domain adaptation, we will open-source our implementations.

For many low-resource languages, the only available language models are large multilingual models trained on many languages simultaneously. However, using FLORES perplexity as a metric, we find that these models perform worse than bigrams for many languages (e.g. 24% of languages in XGLM 4.5B; 43% in BLOOM 7.1B). To facilitate research that focuses on low-resource languages, we pre-train and release Goldfish, a suite of monolingual autoregressive Transformer language models up to 125M parameters for 350 languages. The Goldfish reach lower FLORES perplexities than BLOOM, XGLM, and MaLA-500 on 98 of 204 FLORES languages, despite each Goldfish model being over 10x smaller. However, the Goldfish significantly underperform larger multilingual models on reasoning benchmarks, suggesting that for low-resource languages, multilinguality primarily improves general reasoning abilities rather than basic text generation. We release models trained on 5MB (350 languages), 10MB (288 languages), 100MB (166 languages), and 1GB (83 languages) of text data where available. The Goldfish models are available as baselines, fine-tuning sources, or augmentations to existing models in low-resource NLP research, and they are further useful for crosslinguistic studies requiring maximally comparable models across languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly those similar to ChatGPT, have significantly influenced the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). While these models excel in general language tasks, their performance in domain-specific downstream tasks such as biomedical and clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction (RE), and Medical Natural Language Inference (NLI) is still evolving. In this context, our study investigates the potential of instruction tuning for biomedical language processing, applying this technique to two general LLMs of substantial scale. We present a comprehensive, instruction-based model trained on a dataset that consists of approximately 200,000 instruction-focused samples. This dataset represents a carefully curated compilation of existing data, meticulously adapted and reformatted to align with the specific requirements of our instruction-based tasks. This initiative represents an important step in utilising such models to achieve results on par with specialised encoder-only models like BioBERT and BioClinicalBERT for various classical biomedical NLP tasks. Our work includes an analysis of the dataset's composition and its impact on model performance, providing insights into the intricacies of instruction tuning. By sharing our codes, models, and the distinctively assembled instruction-based dataset, we seek to encourage ongoing research and development in this area.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable proficiency in general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Instruction tuning, a successful paradigm, enhances the ability of LLMs to follow natural language instructions and exhibit robust generalization across a wide range of tasks. However, these models often encounter performance limitations across multiple tasks due to constrained model capacity. Expanding this capacity during the instruction tuning phase poses significant challenges. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach, Parameter-Efficient Sparsity Crafting (PESC), which transitions dense models to sparse models using a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. PESC integrates adapters into the MoE layers of sparse models, differentiating experts without altering the individual weights within these layers. This method significantly reduces computational costs and GPU memory requirements, facilitating model capacity expansion through a minimal increase in parameters via the inserted adapters. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the PESC method. Using PESC during instruction tuning, our sparse models, dubbed Camelidae outperform all other opensource sparse models and exhibit superior general capabilities compared to GPT3.5.

We analyze how well pre-trained large language models (e.g., Llama2, GPT-4, Claude 3, etc) can do linear and non-linear regression when given in-context examples, without any additional training or gradient updates. Our findings reveal that several large language models (e.g., GPT-4, Claude 3) are able to perform regression tasks with a performance rivaling (or even outperforming) that of traditional supervised methods such as Random Forest, Bagging, or Gradient Boosting. For example, on the challenging Friedman #2 regression dataset, Claude 3 outperforms many supervised methods such as AdaBoost, SVM, Random Forest, KNN, or Gradient Boosting. We then investigate how well the performance of large language models scales with the number of in-context exemplars. We borrow from the notion of regret from online learning and empirically show that LLMs are capable of obtaining a sub-linear regret.

In recent months, Language Models (LMs) have become a part of daily discourse, with focus on OpenAI and the potential of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Furthermore, the leaking of LLama's weights to the public has led to an influx of innovations demonstrating the impressive capabilities of generative LMs. While we believe that AGI is still a distant goal, we recognize the potential of LMs in solving tasks such as searching complex documents, compiling reports with basic analysis, and providing assistance in problem-solving. In this paper, we propose formalizing the execution model of language models. We investigate current execution models, to find that this formalism has received little attention, and present our contribution: the first formalized execution model for LMs. We introduce a new algorithm for sampling the predictions of LMs, which we use to build a reliable and inspectable execution model. We introduce a low-level language to write "cognitive program" for this execution model. We hope to shed light on the need for execution models for LMs and encourage further research in this area.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as GPT-4V and Llama 3.2 vision, have garnered significant research attention for their ability to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) in multimodal tasks. However, their potential is constrained by inherent challenges, including proprietary restrictions, substantial computational demands, and limited accessibility. Smaller models, such as GIT and BLIP, exhibit marked limitations, often failing to generate coherent and consistent text beyond a few tokens, even with extensive training. This underscores a pivotal inquiry: how small can a VLM be and still produce fluent and consistent text? Drawing inspiration from the exceptional learning process of 3-4 year old children, who rely heavily on visual cues for understanding and communication, we introduce two novel datasets: ShortDesc (featuring concise image descriptions) and LongDesc (containing more detailed image descriptions). These datasets consist of image-text pairs where the text is restricted to the simple vocabulary and syntax typically used by young children, generated with a scaled- down model, GPT-4o. Using these datasets, we demonstrate that it is possible to train VLMs that are significantly smaller, up to 10 times smaller than state of the art(SOTA) small VLMs while maintaining architectural simplicity. To evaluate the outputs, we leverage GPT-4o to grade the text, as if stories written by students, on creativity, meaningfulness, and consistency, assigning scores out of 10. This method addresses limitations of standard benchmarks by accommodating unstructured outputs and providing a multidimensional evaluation of the model capabilities. Our findings contribute to the development of lightweight, accessible multimodal models for resource constrained environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing, but their full fine-tuning remains resource-intensive. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), have emerged as a practical solution by approximating parameter updates with low-rank matrices. However, LoRA often exhibits a "double descent" phenomenon during fine-tuning, where model performance degrades due to overfitting and limited expressiveness caused by low-rank constraints. To address this issue, we propose LoRA-GGPO (Gradient-Guided Perturbation Optimization), a novel method that leverages gradient and weight norms to generate targeted perturbations. By optimizing the sharpness of the loss landscape, LoRA-GGPO guides the model toward flatter minima, mitigating the double descent problem and improving generalization. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG) tasks demonstrate that LoRA-GGPO outperforms LoRA and its state-of-the-art variants. Furthermore, extended experiments specifically designed to analyze the double descent phenomenon confirm that LoRA-GGPO effectively alleviates this issue, producing more robust and generalizable models. Our work provides a robust and efficient solution for fine-tuning LLMs, with broad applicability in real-world scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/llm172/LoRA-GGPO.

Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling (RALM) methods, that condition a language model (LM) on relevant documents from a grounding corpus during generation, have been shown to significantly improve language modeling while also providing a natural source attribution mechanism. Existing RALM approaches focus on modifying the LM architecture in order to facilitate the incorporation of external information, significantly complicating deployment. This paper proposes an under-explored alternative, which we dub In-Context RALM: leaving the LM architecture unchanged and prepending grounding documents to the input. We show that in-context RALM which uses off-the-shelf general purpose retrievers provides surprisingly large LM gains across model sizes and diverse corpora. We also demonstrate that the document retrieval and ranking mechanism can be specialized to the RALM setting to further boost performance. We conclude that in-context RALM has considerable potential to increase the prevalence of LM grounding, particularly in settings where a pretrained LM must be used without modification or even via API access. To that end, we make our code publicly available.

Building a general-purpose task model similar to ChatGPT has been an important research direction for gene large language models. Instruction fine-tuning is a key component in building ChatGPT, but existing instructions are primarily based on natural language. Natural language and gene sequences have significant differences in tokenization and encoding. Therefore, constructing a multilingual model that can handle both natural language and gene sequences is crucial for solving this problem.In this paper, we expand the capabilities of the LLaMA large language model to include gene language. This involves expanding the vocabulary using the Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) method, specifically tailored for DNA and protein sequences, and conducting further pre-training on these sequences. We then convert various downstream gene task data into a unified format for instruction fine-tuning and further fine-tune the model on this data.Our study demonstrates that a mixed model of gene and natural language, fine-tuned with instructions, achieves results comparable to the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) in tasks such as gene classification and gene sequence interaction. This provides a promising direction for building a unified large language model for gene tasks.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). LLMs require an extreme amount of parameters to attain high performance. As models grow into the trillion-parameter range, computational and memory costs increase significantly. This makes it difficult for many researchers to access the resources needed to train or apply these models. Optimizing LLM performance involves two main approaches: fine-tuning pre-trained models for specific tasks to achieve state-of-the-art performance, and reducing costs or improving training time while maintaining similar performance. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement. We reviewed 65 publications out of 983 from 2017 to December 2023, retrieved from 5 databases. The study presents methods to optimize and accelerate LLMs while achieving cutting-edge results without sacrificing accuracy. We begin with an overview of the development of language modeling, followed by a detailed explanation of commonly used frameworks and libraries, and a taxonomy for improving and speeding up LLMs based on three classes: LLM training, LLM inference, and system serving. We then delve into recent optimization and acceleration strategies such as training optimization, hardware optimization, scalability and reliability, accompanied by the taxonomy and categorization of these strategies. Finally, we provide an in-depth comparison of each class and strategy, with two case studies on optimizing model training and enhancing inference efficiency. These case studies showcase practical approaches to address LLM resource limitations while maintaining performance.

While large language models (LLMs) are empowered with broad knowledge, their task-specific performance is often suboptimal. It necessitates fine-tuning LLMs with task-specific data, but such data may be inaccessible due to privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enhance LLMs with smaller language models (SLMs) that are trained on clients using their private task-specific data. To enable mutual enhancement between LLMs and SLMs, we propose CrossLM, where the SLMs promote the LLM to generate task-specific high-quality data, and both the LLM and SLMs are enhanced with the generated data. We evaluate CrossLM using publicly accessible language models across a range of benchmark tasks. The results demonstrate that CrossLM significantly enhances the task-specific performance of SLMs on clients and the LLM on the cloud server simultaneously while preserving the LLM's generalization capability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a range of scientific tasks including mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Despite their successes, the effectiveness of LLMs in handling complex statistical tasks remains systematically under-explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce StatQA, a new benchmark designed for statistical analysis tasks. StatQA comprises 11,623 examples tailored to evaluate LLMs' proficiency in specialized statistical tasks and their applicability assessment capabilities, particularly for hypothesis testing methods. We systematically experiment with representative LLMs using various prompting strategies and show that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o achieve a best performance of only 64.83%, indicating significant room for improvement. Notably, while open-source LLMs (e.g. LLaMA-3) show limited capability, those fine-tuned ones exhibit marked improvements, outperforming all in-context learning-based methods (e.g. GPT-4o). Moreover, our comparative human experiments highlight a striking contrast in error types between LLMs and humans: LLMs primarily make applicability errors, whereas humans mostly make statistical task confusion errors. This divergence highlights distinct areas of proficiency and deficiency, suggesting that combining LLM and human expertise could lead to complementary strengths, inviting further investigation into their collaborative potential.

We present the ongoing NorLM initiative to support the creation and use of very large contextualised language models for Norwegian (and in principle other Nordic languages), including a ready-to-use software environment, as well as an experience report for data preparation and training. This paper introduces the first large-scale monolingual language models for Norwegian, based on both the ELMo and BERT frameworks. In addition to detailing the training process, we present contrastive benchmark results on a suite of NLP tasks for Norwegian. For additional background and access to the data, models, and software, please see http://norlm.nlpl.eu

Significant strides have been made in natural language tasks, largely attributed to the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs). These models, pre-trained on extensive and diverse corpora, have become increasingly capable of comprehending the intricacies of language. Despite the abundance of LLMs for many high-resource languages, the availability of such models remains limited for European Portuguese. We introduce Gl\'orIA, a robust European Portuguese decoder LLM. To pre-train Gl\'orIA, we assembled a comprehensive PT-PT text corpus comprising 35 billion tokens from various sources. We present our pre-training methodology, followed by an assessment of the model's effectiveness on multiple downstream tasks. Additionally, to evaluate our models' language modeling capabilities, we introduce CALAME-PT (Context-Aware LAnguage Modeling Evaluation for Portuguese), the first Portuguese zero-shot language-modeling benchmark. Evaluation shows that Gl\'orIA significantly outperforms existing open PT decoder models in language modeling and that it can generate sound, knowledge-rich, and coherent PT-PT text. The model also exhibits strong potential for various downstream tasks.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive abilities in generating reasonable responses with respect to multi-modal contents. However, there is still a wide gap between the performance of recent MLLM-based applications and the expectation of the broad public, even though the most powerful OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini have been deployed. This paper strives to enhance understanding of the gap through the lens of a qualitative study on the generalizability, trustworthiness, and causal reasoning capabilities of recent proprietary and open-source MLLMs across four modalities: ie, text, code, image, and video, ultimately aiming to improve the transparency of MLLMs. We believe these properties are several representative factors that define the reliability of MLLMs, in supporting various downstream applications. To be specific, we evaluate the closed-source GPT-4 and Gemini and 6 open-source LLMs and MLLMs. Overall we evaluate 230 manually designed cases, where the qualitative results are then summarized into 12 scores (ie, 4 modalities times 3 properties). In total, we uncover 14 empirical findings that are useful to understand the capabilities and limitations of both proprietary and open-source MLLMs, towards more reliable downstream multi-modal applications.

Understanding and accurately following instructions is critical for large language models (LLMs) to be effective across diverse tasks. In this work, we rigorously examine the key factors that enable models to generalize to unseen instructions, providing insights to guide the collection of data for instruction-tuning. Through controlled experiments, inspired by the Turing-complete Markov algorithm, we demonstrate that such generalization only emerges when training data is diversified enough across semantic domains. Our findings also reveal that merely diversifying within limited domains fails to ensure robust generalization. In contrast, cross-domain data diversification, even under constrained data budgets, significantly enhances a model's adaptability. We further extend our analysis to real-world scenarios, including fine-tuning of $textbf{specialist} and textbf{generalist}$ models. In both cases, we demonstrate that 1) better performance can be achieved by increasing the diversity of an established dataset while keeping the data size constant, and 2) when scaling up the data, diversifying the semantics of instructions is more effective than simply increasing the quantity of similar data. Our research provides important insights for dataset collation, particularly when optimizing model performance by expanding training data for both specialist and generalist scenarios. We show that careful consideration of data diversification is key: training specialist models with data extending beyond their core domain leads to significant performance improvements, while generalist models benefit from diverse data mixtures that enhance their overall instruction-following capabilities across a wide range of applications. Our results highlight the critical role of strategic diversification and offer clear guidelines for improving data quality.

With tremendous efforts on developing effective e-commerce models, conventional e-commerce models show limited success in generalist e-commerce modeling, and suffer from unsatisfactory performance on new users and new products - a typical out-of-domain generalization challenge. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate outstanding performance in generalist modeling and out-of-domain generalizability in many fields. Toward fully unleashing their power for e-commerce, in this paper, we construct ECInstruct, the first open-sourced, large-scale, and high-quality benchmark instruction dataset for e-commerce. Leveraging ECInstruct, we develop eCeLLM, a series of e-commerce LLMs, by instruction-tuning general-purpose LLMs. Our comprehensive experiments and evaluation demonstrate that eCeLLM models substantially outperform baseline models, including the most advanced GPT-4, and the state-of-the-art task-specific models in in-domain evaluation. Moreover, eCeLLM exhibits excellent generalizability to out-of-domain settings, including unseen products and unseen instructions, highlighting its superiority as a generalist e-commerce model. Both the ECInstruct dataset and the eCeLLM models show great potential in empowering versatile and effective LLMs for e-commerce. ECInstruct and eCeLLM models are publicly accessible through https://ninglab.github.io/eCeLLM.

Instruction-following is a fundamental capability of language models, requiring the model to recognize even the most subtle requirements in the instructions and accurately reflect them in its output. Such an ability is well-suited for and often optimized by preference learning. However, existing methods often directly sample multiple independent responses from the model when creating preference pairs. Such practice can introduce content variations irrelevant to whether the instruction is precisely followed (e.g., different expressions about the same semantic), interfering with the goal of teaching models to recognize the key differences that lead to improved instruction following. In light of this, we introduce SPaR, a self-play framework integrating tree-search self-refinement to yield valid and comparable preference pairs free from distractions. By playing against itself, an LLM employs a tree-search strategy to refine its previous responses with respect to the instruction while minimizing unnecessary variations. Our experiments show that a LLaMA3-8B model, trained over three iterations guided by SPaR, surpasses GPT-4-Turbo on the IFEval benchmark without losing general capabilities. Furthermore, SPaR demonstrates promising scalability and transferability, greatly enhancing models like GLM-4-9B and LLaMA3-70B. We also identify how inference scaling in tree search would impact model performance. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/thu-coai/SPaR.

Based on the foundation of Large Language Models (LLMs), Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been developed to address the challenges of multilingual natural language processing tasks, hoping to achieve knowledge transfer from high-resource to low-resource languages. However, significant limitations and challenges still exist, such as language imbalance, multilingual alignment, and inherent bias. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of MLLMs, delving deeply into discussions surrounding these critical issues. First of all, we start by presenting an overview of MLLMs, covering their evolution, key techniques, and multilingual capacities. Secondly, we explore widely utilized multilingual corpora for MLLMs' training and multilingual datasets oriented for downstream tasks that are crucial for enhancing the cross-lingual capability of MLLMs. Thirdly, we survey the existing studies on multilingual representations and investigate whether the current MLLMs can learn a universal language representation. Fourthly, we discuss bias on MLLMs including its category and evaluation metrics, and summarize the existing debiasing techniques. Finally, we discuss existing challenges and point out promising research directions. By demonstrating these aspects, this paper aims to facilitate a deeper understanding of MLLMs and their potentiality in various domains.

Large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks in NLP and beyond, but most open models have very limited coverage of smaller languages and LLM work tends to focus on languages where nearly unlimited data is available for pretraining. In this work, we study the challenges of creating LLMs for Finnish, a language spoken by less than 0.1% of the world population. We compile an extensive dataset of Finnish combining web crawls, news, social media and eBooks. We pursue two approaches to pretrain models: 1) we train seven monolingual models from scratch (186M to 13B parameters) dubbed FinGPT, 2) we continue the pretraining of the multilingual BLOOM model on a mix of its original training data and Finnish, resulting in a 176 billion parameter model we call BLUUMI. For model evaluation, we introduce FIN-bench, a version of BIG-bench with Finnish tasks. We also assess other model qualities such as toxicity and bias. Our models and tools are openly available at https://turkunlp.org/gpt3-finnish.

Language models have become a critical technology to tackling a wide range of natural language processing tasks, yet many details about how the best-performing language models were developed are not reported. In particular, information about their pretraining corpora is seldom discussed: commercial language models rarely provide any information about their data; even open models rarely release datasets they are trained on, or an exact recipe to reproduce them. As a result, it is challenging to conduct certain threads of language modeling research, such as understanding how training data impacts model capabilities and shapes their limitations. To facilitate open research on language model pretraining, we release Dolma, a three trillion tokens English corpus, built from a diverse mixture of web content, scientific papers, code, public-domain books, social media, and encyclopedic materials. In addition, we open source our data curation toolkit to enable further experimentation and reproduction of our work. In this report, we document Dolma, including its design principles, details about its construction, and a summary of its contents. We interleave this report with analyses and experimental results from training language models on intermediate states of Dolma to share what we have learned about important data curation practices, including the role of content or quality filters, deduplication, and multi-source mixing. Dolma has been used to train OLMo, a state-of-the-art, open language model and framework designed to build and study the science of language modeling.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet they encounter challenges such as hallucination and the need for domain-specific knowledge. To mitigate these, recent methodologies have integrated information retrieved from external resources with LLMs, substantially enhancing their performance across NLP tasks. This survey paper addresses the absence of a comprehensive overview on Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs), both Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Retrieval-Augmented Understanding (RAU), providing an in-depth examination of their paradigm, evolution, taxonomy, and applications. The paper discusses the essential components of RALMs, including Retrievers, Language Models, and Augmentations, and how their interactions lead to diverse model structures and applications. RALMs demonstrate utility in a spectrum of tasks, from translation and dialogue systems to knowledge-intensive applications. The survey includes several evaluation methods of RALMs, emphasizing the importance of robustness, accuracy, and relevance in their assessment. It also acknowledges the limitations of RALMs, particularly in retrieval quality and computational efficiency, offering directions for future research. In conclusion, this survey aims to offer a structured insight into RALMs, their potential, and the avenues for their future development in NLP. The paper is supplemented with a Github Repository containing the surveyed works and resources for further study: https://github.com/2471023025/RALM_Survey.

Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with instruction tuning have made significant progress when generalizing to unseen tasks. However, they have been less successful in Information Extraction (IE), lagging behind task-specific models. Typically, IE tasks are characterized by complex annotation guidelines which describe the task and give examples to humans. Previous attempts to leverage such information have failed, even with the largest models, as they are not able to follow the guidelines out-of-the-box. In this paper we propose GoLLIE (Guideline-following Large Language Model for IE), a model able to improve zero-shot results on unseen IE tasks by virtue of being fine-tuned to comply with annotation guidelines. Comprehensive evaluation empirically demonstrates that GoLLIE is able to generalize to and follow unseen guidelines, outperforming previous attempts at zero-shot information extraction. The ablation study shows that detailed guidelines is key for good results.

Large Language Models (LLM)-based systems, i.e. interconnected elements that include an LLM as a central component (e.g., conversational agents), are typically monolithic static architectures that rely on a single LLM for all user queries. However, they often require different preprocessing strategies, levels of reasoning, or knowledge. Generalist LLMs (i.e. GPT-4), trained on very large multi-topic corpora, can perform well in a variety of tasks. However, they require significant financial, energy, and hardware resources that may not be justified for basic tasks. This implies potentially investing in unnecessary costs for a given query. To overcome this problem, a routing mechanism routes user queries to the most suitable components, such as smaller LLMs or experts in specific topics. This approach may improve response quality while minimising costs. Routing can be expanded to other components of the conversational agent architecture, such as the selection of optimal embedding strategies. This paper explores key considerations for integrating routing into LLM-based systems, focusing on resource management, cost definition, and strategy selection. Our main contributions include a formalisation of the problem, a novel taxonomy of existing approaches emphasising relevance and resource efficiency, and a comparative analysis of these strategies in relation to industry practices. Finally, we identify critical challenges and directions for future research.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 has sparked discussions on the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, replicating such advancements in open-source models has been challenging. This paper introduces InternLM2, an open-source LLM that outperforms its predecessors in comprehensive evaluations across 6 dimensions and 30 benchmarks, long-context modeling, and open-ended subjective evaluations through innovative pre-training and optimization techniques. The pre-training process of InternLM2 is meticulously detailed, highlighting the preparation of diverse data types including text, code, and long-context data. InternLM2 efficiently captures long-term dependencies, initially trained on 4k tokens before advancing to 32k tokens in pre-training and fine-tuning stages, exhibiting remarkable performance on the 200k ``Needle-in-a-Haystack" test. InternLM2 is further aligned using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and a novel Conditional Online Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (COOL RLHF) strategy that addresses conflicting human preferences and reward hacking. By releasing InternLM2 models in different training stages and model sizes, we provide the community with insights into the model's evolution.

In the domain of data science, the predictive tasks of classification, regression, and imputation of missing values are commonly encountered challenges associated with tabular data. This research endeavors to apply Large Language Models (LLMs) towards addressing these predictive tasks. Despite their proficiency in comprehending natural language, LLMs fall short in dealing with structured tabular data. This limitation stems from their lacking exposure to the intricacies of tabular data during their foundational training. Our research aims to mitigate this gap by compiling a comprehensive corpus of tables annotated with instructions and executing large-scale training of Llama-2 on this enriched dataset. Furthermore, we investigate the practical application of applying the trained model to zero-shot prediction, few-shot prediction, and in-context learning scenarios. Through extensive experiments, our methodology has shown significant improvements over existing benchmarks. These advancements highlight the efficacy of tailoring LLM training to solve table-related problems in data science, thereby establishing a new benchmark in the utilization of LLMs for enhancing tabular intelligence.

Natural language processing (NLP) has witnessed a profound impact of large language models (LLMs) that excel in a multitude of tasks. However, the limitation of LLMs in multilingual settings, particularly in underrepresented languages, remains a significant hurdle. This thesis aims to bridge the gap in NLP research and development by focusing on underrepresented languages. A comprehensive evaluation of LLMs is conducted to assess their capabilities in these languages, revealing the challenges of multilingual and multicultural generalization. Addressing the multilingual generalization gap, this thesis proposes data-and-compute-efficient methods to mitigate the disparity in LLM ability in underrepresented languages, allowing better generalization on underrepresented languages without the loss of task generalization ability. The proposed solutions cover cross-lingual continual instruction tuning, retrieval-based cross-lingual in-context learning, and in-context query alignment. Furthermore, a novel method to measure cultural values alignment between LLMs operating in different languages is proposed, ensuring cultural sensitivity and inclusivity. These contributions aim to enhance the multilingual and multicultural alignment of LLMs in underrepresented languages, ultimately advancing the NLP field toward greater equality and inclusiveness.

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the latest research on multilingual large language models (MLLMs). MLLMs not only are able to understand and generate language across linguistic boundaries, but also represent an important advancement in artificial intelligence. We first discuss the architecture and pre-training objectives of MLLMs, highlighting the key components and methodologies that contribute to their multilingual capabilities. We then discuss the construction of multilingual pre-training and alignment datasets, underscoring the importance of data quality and diversity in enhancing MLLM performance. An important focus of this survey is on the evaluation of MLLMs. We present a detailed taxonomy and roadmap covering the assessment of MLLMs' cross-lingual knowledge, reasoning, alignment with human values, safety, interpretability and specialized applications. Specifically, we extensively discuss multilingual evaluation benchmarks and datasets, and explore the use of LLMs themselves as multilingual evaluators. To enhance MLLMs from black to white boxes, we also address the interpretability of multilingual capabilities, cross-lingual transfer and language bias within these models. Finally, we provide a comprehensive review of real-world applications of MLLMs across diverse domains, including biology, medicine, computer science, mathematics and law. We showcase how these models have driven innovation and improvements in these specialized fields while also highlighting the challenges and opportunities in deploying MLLMs within diverse language communities and application scenarios. We listed the paper related in this survey and publicly available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/Awesome-Multilingual-LLMs-Papers.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are widely regarded as crucial in the exploration of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The core of MLLMs lies in their capability to achieve cross-modal alignment. To attain this goal, current MLLMs typically follow a two-phase training paradigm: the pre-training phase and the instruction-tuning phase. Despite their success, there are shortcomings in the modeling of alignment capabilities within these models. Firstly, during the pre-training phase, the model usually assumes that all image-text pairs are uniformly aligned, but in fact the degree of alignment between different image-text pairs is inconsistent. Secondly, the instructions currently used for finetuning incorporate a variety of tasks, different tasks's instructions usually require different levels of alignment capabilities, but previous MLLMs overlook these differentiated alignment needs. To tackle these issues, we propose a new multimodal large language model AlignGPT. In the pre-training stage, instead of treating all image-text pairs equally, we assign different levels of alignment capabilities to different image-text pairs. Then, in the instruction-tuning phase, we adaptively combine these different levels of alignment capabilities to meet the dynamic alignment needs of different instructions. Extensive experimental results show that our model achieves competitive performance on 12 benchmarks.

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.

This paper details the process of developing the first native large generative language model for the Nordic languages, GPT-SW3. We cover all parts of the development process, from data collection and processing, training configuration and instruction finetuning, to evaluation and considerations for release strategies. We hope that this paper can serve as a guide and reference for other researchers that undertake the development of large generative models for smaller languages.

We present DictaLM, a large-scale language model tailored for Modern Hebrew. Boasting 7B parameters, this model is predominantly trained on Hebrew-centric data. As a commitment to promoting research and development in the Hebrew language, we release both the foundation model and the instruct-tuned model under a Creative Commons license. Concurrently, we introduce DictaLM-Rab, another foundation model geared towards Rabbinic/Historical Hebrew. These foundation models serve as ideal starting points for fine-tuning various Hebrew-specific tasks, such as instruction, Q&A, sentiment analysis, and more. This release represents a preliminary step, offering an initial Hebrew LLM model for the Hebrew NLP community to experiment with.

Pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Recent works such as T5 and GPT-3 have shown that scaling up pre-trained language models can improve their generalization abilities. Particularly, the GPT-3 model with 175 billion parameters shows its strong task-agnostic zero-shot/few-shot learning capabilities. Despite their success, these large-scale models are trained on plain texts without introducing knowledge such as linguistic knowledge and world knowledge. In addition, most large-scale models are trained in an auto-regressive way. As a result, this kind of traditional fine-tuning approach demonstrates relatively weak performance when solving downstream language understanding tasks. In order to solve the above problems, we propose a unified framework named ERNIE 3.0 for pre-training large-scale knowledge enhanced models. It fuses auto-regressive network and auto-encoding network, so that the trained model can be easily tailored for both natural language understanding and generation tasks with zero-shot learning, few-shot learning or fine-tuning. We trained the model with 10 billion parameters on a 4TB corpus consisting of plain texts and a large-scale knowledge graph. Empirical results show that the model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on 54 Chinese NLP tasks, and its English version achieves the first place on the SuperGLUE benchmark (July 3, 2021), surpassing the human performance by +0.8% (90.6% vs. 89.8%).

As a prominent direction of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have garnered increased attention from both industry and academia. Building upon pre-trained LLMs, this family of models further develops multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities that are impressive, such as writing code given a flow chart or creating stories based on an image. In the development process, evaluation is critical since it provides intuitive feedback and guidance on improving models. Distinct from the traditional train-eval-test paradigm that only favors a single task like image classification, the versatility of MLLMs has spurred the rise of various new benchmarks and evaluation methods. In this paper, we aim to present a comprehensive survey of MLLM evaluation, discussing four key aspects: 1) the summarised benchmarks types divided by the evaluation capabilities, including foundation capabilities, model self-analysis, and extented applications; 2) the typical process of benchmark counstruction, consisting of data collection, annotation, and precautions; 3) the systematic evaluation manner composed of judge, metric, and toolkit; 4) the outlook for the next benchmark. This work aims to offer researchers an easy grasp of how to effectively evaluate MLLMs according to different needs and to inspire better evaluation methods, thereby driving the progress of MLLM research.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold significant potential in the medical field, but their capabilities are often limited by insufficient data in certain medical domains, highlighting the need for understanding what kinds of images can be used by MLLMs for generalization. Current research suggests that multi-task training outperforms single-task as different tasks can benefit each other, but they often overlook the internal relationships within these tasks, providing limited guidance on selecting datasets to enhance specific tasks. To analyze this phenomenon, we attempted to employ compositional generalization (CG)-the ability of models to understand novel combinations by recombining learned elements-as a guiding framework. Since medical images can be precisely defined by Modality, Anatomical area, and Task, naturally providing an environment for exploring CG. Therefore, we assembled 106 medical datasets to create Med-MAT for comprehensive experiments. The experiments confirmed that MLLMs can use CG to understand unseen medical images and identified CG as one of the main drivers of the generalization observed in multi-task training. Additionally, further studies demonstrated that CG effectively supports datasets with limited data and delivers consistent performance across different backbones, highlighting its versatility and broad applicability. Med-MAT is publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Med-MAT.

Large Language Models (LLMs), typified by OpenAI's GPT series and Meta's LLaMA variants, have marked a significant advancement in artificial intelligence. Trained on vast amounts of text data, LLMs are capable of understanding and generating human-like text across a diverse range of topics. This study expands on the applications of LLMs, exploring their potential in data preprocessing, a critical stage in data mining and analytics applications. We delve into the applicability of state-of-the-art LLMs such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Vicuna-13B for error detection, data imputation, schema matching, and entity matching tasks. Alongside showcasing the inherent capabilities of LLMs, we highlight their limitations, particularly in terms of computational expense and inefficiency. We propose an LLM-based framework for data preprocessing, which integrates cutting-edge prompt engineering techniques, coupled with traditional methods like contextualization and feature selection, to improve the performance and efficiency of these models. The effectiveness of LLMs in data preprocessing is evaluated through an experimental study spanning 12 datasets. GPT-4 emerged as a standout, achieving 100\% accuracy or F1 score on 4 datasets, suggesting LLMs' immense potential in these tasks. Despite certain limitations, our study underscores the promise of LLMs in this domain and anticipates future developments to overcome current hurdles.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) are often trained on extensive, temporally indiscriminate text corpora, reflecting the lack of datasets with temporal metadata. This approach is not aligned with the evolving nature of language. Conventional methods for creating temporally adapted language models often depend on further pre-training static models on time-specific data. This paper presents a new approach: a series of point-in-time LLMs called Time Machine GPT (TiMaGPT), specifically designed to be nonprognosticative. This ensures they remain uninformed about future factual information and linguistic changes. This strategy is beneficial for understanding language evolution and is of critical importance when applying models in dynamic contexts, such as time-series forecasting, where foresight of future information can prove problematic. We provide access to both the models and training datasets.

We present SnakModel, a Danish large language model (LLM) based on Llama2-7B, which we continuously pre-train on 13.6B Danish words, and further tune on 3.7M Danish instructions. As best practices for creating LLMs for smaller language communities have yet to be established, we examine the effects of early modeling and training decisions on downstream performance throughout the entire training pipeline, including (1) the creation of a strictly curated corpus of Danish text from diverse sources; (2) the language modeling and instruction-tuning training process itself, including the analysis of intermediate training dynamics, and ablations across different hyperparameters; (3) an evaluation on eight language and culturally-specific tasks. Across these experiments SnakModel achieves the highest overall performance, outperforming multiple contemporary Llama2-7B-based models. By making SnakModel, the majority of our pre-training corpus, and the associated code available under open licenses, we hope to foster further research and development in Danish Natural Language Processing, and establish training guidelines for languages with similar resource constraints.

Large language models (LLMs) have notably accelerated progress towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), with their impressive zero-shot capacity for user-tailored tasks, endowing them with immense potential across a range of applications. However, in the field of computer vision, despite the availability of numerous powerful vision foundation models (VFMs), they are still restricted to tasks in a pre-defined form, struggling to match the open-ended task capabilities of LLMs. In this work, we present an LLM-based framework for vision-centric tasks, termed VisionLLM. This framework provides a unified perspective for vision and language tasks by treating images as a foreign language and aligning vision-centric tasks with language tasks that can be flexibly defined and managed using language instructions. An LLM-based decoder can then make appropriate predictions based on these instructions for open-ended tasks. Extensive experiments show that the proposed VisionLLM can achieve different levels of task customization through language instructions, from fine-grained object-level to coarse-grained task-level customization, all with good results. It's noteworthy that, with a generalist LLM-based framework, our model can achieve over 60\% mAP on COCO, on par with detection-specific models. We hope this model can set a new baseline for generalist vision and language models. The demo shall be released based on https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternGPT. The code shall be released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/VisionLLM.

This paper introduces a multifaceted methodology for fine-tuning and evaluating large language models (LLMs) for specialized monetization tasks. The goal is to balance general language proficiency with domain-specific skills. The methodology has three main components: 1) Carefully blending in-domain and general-purpose data during fine-tuning to achieve an optimal balance between general and specialized capabilities; 2) Designing a comprehensive evaluation framework with 45 questions tailored to assess performance on functionally relevant dimensions like reliability, consistency, and business impact; 3) Analyzing how model size and continual training influence metrics to guide efficient resource allocation during fine-tuning. The paper details the design, data collection, analytical techniques, and results validating the proposed frameworks. It aims to provide businesses and researchers with actionable insights on effectively adapting LLMs for specialized contexts. We also intend to make public the comprehensive evaluation framework, which includes the 45 tailored questions and their respective scoring guidelines, to foster transparency and collaboration in adapting LLMs for specialized tasks.

We introduce a novel approach for building language models based on a systematic, recursive exploration of skip n-gram models which are interpolated using modified Kneser-Ney smoothing. Our approach generalizes language models as it contains the classical interpolation with lower order models as a special case. In this paper we motivate, formalize and present our approach. In an extensive empirical experiment over English text corpora we demonstrate that our generalized language models lead to a substantial reduction of perplexity between 3.1% and 12.7% in comparison to traditional language models using modified Kneser-Ney smoothing. Furthermore, we investigate the behaviour over three other languages and a domain specific corpus where we observed consistent improvements. Finally, we also show that the strength of our approach lies in its ability to cope in particular with sparse training data. Using a very small training data set of only 736 KB text we yield improvements of even 25.7% reduction of perplexity.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) like LLaVA and GPT-4(V) enable general-purpose conversations about images with the language modality. As off-the-shelf MLLMs may have limited capabilities on images from domains like dermatology and agriculture, they must be fine-tuned to unlock domain-specific applications. The prevalent architecture of current open-source MLLMs comprises two major modules: an image-language (cross-modal) projection network and a large language model. It is desirable to understand the roles of these two modules in modeling domain-specific visual attributes to inform the design of future models and streamline the interpretability efforts on the current models. To this end, via experiments on 4 datasets and under 2 fine-tuning settings, we find that as the MLLM is fine-tuned, it indeed gains domain-specific visual capabilities, but the updates do not lead to the projection extracting relevant domain-specific visual attributes. Our results indicate that the domain-specific visual attributes are modeled by the LLM, even when only the projection is fine-tuned. Through this study, we offer a potential reinterpretation of the role of cross-modal projections in MLLM architectures. Projection webpage: https://claws-lab.github.io/projection-in-MLLMs/

When scaled to hundreds of billions of parameters, pretrained language models such as GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) achieve remarkable few-shot performance. However, enormous amounts of compute are required for training and applying such big models, resulting in a large carbon footprint and making it difficult for researchers and practitioners to use them. We show that performance similar to GPT-3 can be obtained with language models that are much "greener" in that their parameter count is several orders of magnitude smaller. This is achieved by converting textual inputs into cloze questions that contain a task description, combined with gradient-based optimization; exploiting unlabeled data gives further improvements. We identify key factors required for successful natural language understanding with small language models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success as general-purpose task solvers across various fields, including NLP, healthcare, finance, and law. However, their capabilities remain limited when addressing domain-specific problems, particularly in downstream NLP tasks. Research has shown that models fine-tuned on instruction-based downstream NLP datasets outperform those that are not fine-tuned. While most efforts in this area have primarily focused on resource-rich languages like English and broad domains, little attention has been given to multilingual settings and specific domains. To address this gap, this study focuses on developing a specialized LLM, LlamaLens, for analyzing news and social media content in a multilingual context. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle both domain specificity and multilinguality, with a particular focus on news and social media. Our experimental setup includes 19 tasks, represented by 52 datasets covering Arabic, English, and Hindi. We demonstrate that LlamaLens outperforms the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) on 16 testing sets, and achieves comparable performance on 10 sets. We make the models and resources publicly available for the research community.(https://huggingface.co/QCRI)

The increasing use of tools and solutions based on Large Language Models (LLMs) for various tasks in the medical domain has become a prominent trend. Their use in this highly critical and sensitive domain has thus raised important questions about their robustness, especially in response to variations in input, and the reliability of the generated outputs. This study addresses these questions by constructing a textual dataset based on the ICD-10-CM code descriptions, widely used in US hospitals and containing many clinical terms, and their easily reproducible rephrasing. We then benchmarked existing embedding models, either generalist or specialized in the clinical domain, in a semantic search task where the goal was to correctly match the rephrased text to the original description. Our results showed that generalist models performed better than clinical models, suggesting that existing clinical specialized models are more sensitive to small changes in input that confuse them. The highlighted problem of specialized models may be due to the fact that they have not been trained on sufficient data, and in particular on datasets that are not diverse enough to have a reliable global language understanding, which is still necessary for accurate handling of medical documents.

Diabetes is a chronic disease that poses a significant global health burden, and optimizing diabetes management requires multi-stakeholder collaboration. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in various healthcare scenarios, but their effectiveness across a diverse range of diabetes tasks remains unproven. In this study, we introduced a framework to train and validate diabetes-specific LLMs. We first developed a comprehensive data processing pipeline that includes data collection, filtering, augmentation and refinement. This approach contributes to creating a high-quality, diabetes-specific dataset, and several evaluation benchmarks entirely from scratch. Utilizing the collected training dataset, we fine-tuned a diabetes-specific LLM family that demonstrated state-of-the-art proficiency in understanding and processing various diabetes tasks compared to other LLMs. Furthermore, clinical studies showed the potential applications of our models in diabetes care, including providing personalized healthcare, assisting medical education, and streamlining clinical tasks. In conclusion, our study introduced a framework to develop and evaluate a diabetes-specific LLM family, and highlighted its potential to enhance clinical practice and provide personalized, data-driven support for diabetes support when facing different end users. The code is provided via GitHub at https://github.com/waltonfuture/Diabetica.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable ability to comprehend, reason, and generate following nature language instructions. However, the development of LLMs has been primarily focused on high-resource languages, such as English, thereby limiting their applicability and research in other languages. Consequently, we present PolyLM, a multilingual LLM trained on 640 billion (B) tokens, avaliable in two model sizes: 1.7B and 13B. To enhance its multilingual capabilities, we 1) integrate bilingual data into training data; and 2) adopt a curriculum learning strategy that increases the proportion of non-English data from 30% in the first stage to 60% in the final stage during pre-training. Further, we propose a multilingual self-instruct method which automatically generates 132.7K diverse multilingual instructions for model fine-tuning. To assess the model's performance, we collect several existing multilingual tasks, including multilingual understanding, question answering, generation, and translation. Extensive experiments show that PolyLM surpasses other open-source models such as LLaMA and BLOOM on multilingual tasks while maintaining comparable performance in English. Our models, alone with the instruction data and multilingual benchmark, are available at: https://modelscope.cn/models/damo/nlp_polylm_13b_text_generation.

Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have been shown to encode strong language-specific signals, which are not explicitly provided during pretraining. It remains an open question whether it is feasible to employ mPLMs to measure language similarity, and subsequently use the similarity results to select source languages for boosting cross-lingual transfer. To investigate this, we propose mPLMSim, a language similarity measure that induces the similarities across languages from mPLMs using multi-parallel corpora. Our study shows that mPLM-Sim exhibits moderately high correlations with linguistic similarity measures, such as lexicostatistics, genealogical language family, and geographical sprachbund. We also conduct a case study on languages with low correlation and observe that mPLM-Sim yields more accurate similarity results. Additionally, we find that similarity results vary across different mPLMs and different layers within an mPLM. We further investigate whether mPLMSim is effective for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by conducting experiments on both low-level syntactic tasks and high-level semantic tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that mPLM-Sim is capable of selecting better source languages than linguistic measures, resulting in a 1%-2% improvement in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) with a billion or more parameters are prime targets for network pruning, which aims to reduce a portion of the network weights without compromising performance. Prior approaches such as Weights Magnitude, SparseGPT, and Wanda, either concentrated solely on weights or integrated weights with activations for sparsity. However, they overlooked the informative gradients derived from pretrained large language models. In this paper, we present a novel sparsity-centric pruning method for pretrained LLMs, termed Gradient-based Language Model Pruner (GBLM-Pruner). GBLM-Pruner leverages the first-order term of the Taylor expansion, operating in a training-free manner by harnessing properly normalized gradients from a few calibration samples to determine the importance pruning score, and substantially outperforms competitive counterparts like SparseGPT and Wanda in multiple benchmarks. Intriguing, after incorporating gradients, the unstructured pruning method tends to reveal some structural patterns post-pruning, which mirrors the geometric interdependence inherent in the LLMs' parameter structure. Additionally, GBLM-Pruner functions without any subsequent retraining or weight updates to maintain its simplicity as other counterparts. Extensive evaluations on LLaMA-1 and LLaMA-2 across various language benchmarks and perplexity show that GBLM-Pruner surpasses magnitude pruning, Wanda (weights+activations) and SparseGPT (weights+activations+weight update) by significant margins. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/RocktimJyotiDas/GBLM-Pruner.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI), leading to the development of increasingly large models such as GPT-4 and LLaMA-405B. However, scaling up model sizes results in exponentially higher computational costs and energy consumption, making these models impractical for academic researchers and businesses with limited resources. At the same time, Small Models (SMs) are frequently used in practical settings, although their significance is currently underestimated. This raises important questions about the role of small models in the era of LLMs, a topic that has received limited attention in prior research. In this work, we systematically examine the relationship between LLMs and SMs from two key perspectives: Collaboration and Competition. We hope this survey provides valuable insights for practitioners, fostering a deeper understanding of the contribution of small models and promoting more efficient use of computational resources. The code is available at https://github.com/tigerchen52/role_of_small_models

Recent studies highlight the potential of large language models in creating educational tools for children, yet significant challenges remain in maintaining key child-specific properties such as linguistic nuances, cognitive needs, and safety standards. In this paper, we explore foundational steps toward the development of child-specific language models, emphasizing the necessity of high-quality pre-training data. We introduce a novel user-centric data collection pipeline that involves gathering and validating a corpus specifically written for and sometimes by children. Additionally, we propose a new training objective, Stratified Masking, which dynamically adjusts masking probabilities based on our domain-specific child language data, enabling models to prioritize vocabulary and concepts more suitable for children. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our model excels in understanding lower grade-level text, maintains safety by avoiding stereotypes, and captures children's unique preferences. Furthermore, we provide actionable insights for future research and development in child-specific language modeling.

The current trend to improve language model performance seems to be based on scaling up with the number of parameters (e.g. the state of the art GPT4 model has approximately 1.7 trillion parameters) or the amount of training data fed into the model. However this comes at significant costs in terms of computational resources and energy costs that compromise the sustainability of AI solutions, as well as risk relating to privacy and misuse. In this paper we present the Erasmian Language Model (ELM) a small context specific, 900 million parameter model, pre-trained and fine-tuned by and for Erasmus University Rotterdam. We show how the model performs adequately in a classroom context for essay writing, and how it achieves superior performance in subjects that are part of its context. This has implications for a wide range of institutions and organizations, showing that context specific language models may be a viable alternative for resource constrained, privacy sensitive use cases.

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.

The evaluation of large language models is an essential task in the field of language understanding and generation. As language models continue to advance, the need for effective benchmarks to assess their performance has become imperative. In the context of Traditional Chinese, there is a scarcity of comprehensive and diverse benchmarks to evaluate the capabilities of language models, despite the existence of certain benchmarks such as DRCD, TTQA, CMDQA, and FGC dataset. To address this gap, we propose a novel set of benchmarks that leverage existing English datasets and are tailored to evaluate language models in Traditional Chinese. These benchmarks encompass a wide range of tasks, including contextual question-answering, summarization, classification, and table understanding. The proposed benchmarks offer a comprehensive evaluation framework, enabling the assessment of language models' capabilities across different tasks. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of GPT-3.5, Taiwan-LLaMa-v1.0, and Model 7-C, our proprietary model, on these benchmarks. The evaluation results highlight that our model, Model 7-C, achieves performance comparable to GPT-3.5 with respect to a part of the evaluated capabilities. In an effort to advance the evaluation of language models in Traditional Chinese and stimulate further research in this field, we have open-sourced our benchmark and opened the model for trial.

Structured data sources, such as tables, graphs, and databases, are ubiquitous knowledge sources. Despite the demonstrated capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on plain text, their proficiency in interpreting and utilizing structured data remains limited. Our investigation reveals a notable deficiency in LLMs' ability to process structured data, e.g., ChatGPT lags behind state-of-the-art (SoTA) model by an average of 35%. To augment the Structured Knowledge Grounding (SKG) capabilities in LLMs, we have developed a comprehensive instruction tuning dataset comprising 1.1 million examples. Utilizing this dataset, we train a series of models, referred to as StructLM, based on the Code-LLaMA architecture, ranging from 7B to 34B parameters. Our StructLM series surpasses task-specific models on 14 out of 18 evaluated datasets and establishes new SoTA achievements on 7 SKG tasks. Furthermore, StructLM demonstrates exceptional generalization across 6 novel SKG tasks. Contrary to expectations, we observe that scaling model size offers marginal benefits, with StructLM-34B showing only slight improvements over StructLM-7B. This suggests that structured knowledge grounding is still a challenging task and requires more innovative design to push to a new level.

Word embeddings are an essential instrument in many NLP tasks. Most available resources are trained on general language from Web corpora or Wikipedia dumps. However, word embeddings for domain-specific language are rare, in particular for the social science domain. Therefore, in this work, we describe the creation and evaluation of word embedding models based on 37,604 open-access social science research papers. In the evaluation, we compare domain-specific and general language models for (i) language coverage, (ii) diversity, and (iii) semantic relationships. We found that the created domain-specific model, even with a relatively small vocabulary size, covers a large part of social science concepts, their neighborhoods are diverse in comparison to more general models. Across all relation types, we found a more extensive coverage of semantic relationships.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated a powerful ability to answer various queries as a general-purpose assistant. The continuous multi-modal large language models (MLLM) empower LLMs with the ability to perceive visual signals. The launch of GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) has generated significant interest in the research communities. GPT-4V(ison) has demonstrated significant power in both academia and industry fields, as a focal point in a new artificial intelligence generation. Though significant success was achieved by GPT-4V, exploring MLLMs in domain-specific analysis (e.g., marine analysis) that required domain-specific knowledge and expertise has gained less attention. In this study, we carry out the preliminary and comprehensive case study of utilizing GPT-4V for marine analysis. This report conducts a systematic evaluation of existing GPT-4V, assessing the performance of GPT-4V on marine research and also setting a new standard for future developments in MLLMs. The experimental results of GPT-4V show that the responses generated by GPT-4V are still far away from satisfying the domain-specific requirements of the marine professions. All images and prompts used in this study will be available at https://github.com/hkust-vgd/Marine_GPT-4V_Eval

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities across diverse distributions and tasks, largely due to extensive pre-training datasets. Fine-tuning MLLM has become a common practice to improve performance on specific downstream tasks. However, during fine-tuning, MLLM often faces the risk of forgetting knowledge acquired during pre-training, which can result in a decline in generalization abilities. To balance the trade-off between generalization and specialization, we propose measuring the parameter importance for both pre-trained and fine-tuning distributions, based on frozen pre-trained weight magnitude and accumulated fine-tuning gradient values. We further apply an importance-aware weight allocation strategy, selectively updating relatively important parameters for downstream tasks. We conduct empirical evaluations on both image captioning and visual question-answering tasks using various MLLM architectures. The comprehensive experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed solution, highlighting the efficiency of the crucial modules in enhancing downstream specialization performance while mitigating generalization degradation in MLLM Fine-Tuning.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enhanced the ability to generalize across a wide range of unseen natural language processing (NLP) tasks through instruction-following. Yet, their effectiveness often diminishes in low-resource languages like Chinese, exacerbated by biased evaluations from data leakage, casting doubt on their true generalizability to new linguistic territories. In response, we introduce the Chinese Instruction-Following Benchmark (CIF-Bench), designed to evaluate the zero-shot generalizability of LLMs to the Chinese language. CIF-Bench comprises 150 tasks and 15,000 input-output pairs, developed by native speakers to test complex reasoning and Chinese cultural nuances across 20 categories. To mitigate evaluation bias, we release only half of the dataset publicly, with the remainder kept private, and introduce diversified instructions to minimize score variance, totaling 45,000 data instances. Our evaluation of 28 selected LLMs reveals a noticeable performance gap, with the best model scoring only 52.9%, highlighting the limitations of LLMs in less familiar language and task contexts. This work aims to uncover the current limitations of LLMs in handling Chinese tasks, pushing towards the development of more culturally informed and linguistically diverse models with the released data and benchmark (https://yizhilll.github.io/CIF-Bench/).

Advances in large language models (LLMs) provide new opportunities in healthcare for improved patient care, clinical decision-making, and enhancement of physician and administrator workflows. However, the potential of these models importantly depends on their ability to generalize effectively across clinical environments and populations, a challenge often underestimated in early development. To better understand reasons for these challenges and inform mitigation approaches, we evaluated ClinicLLM, an LLM trained on [HOSPITAL]'s clinical notes, analyzing its performance on 30-day all-cause readmission prediction focusing on variability across hospitals and patient characteristics. We found poorer generalization particularly in hospitals with fewer samples, among patients with government and unspecified insurance, the elderly, and those with high comorbidities. To understand reasons for lack of generalization, we investigated sample sizes for fine-tuning, note content (number of words per note), patient characteristics (comorbidity level, age, insurance type, borough), and health system aspects (hospital, all-cause 30-day readmission, and mortality rates). We used descriptive statistics and supervised classification to identify features. We found that, along with sample size, patient age, number of comorbidities, and the number of words in notes are all important factors related to generalization. Finally, we compared local fine-tuning (hospital specific), instance-based augmented fine-tuning and cluster-based fine-tuning for improving generalization. Among these, local fine-tuning proved most effective, increasing AUC by 0.25% to 11.74% (most helpful in settings with limited data). Overall, this study provides new insights for enhancing the deployment of large language models in the societally important domain of healthcare, and improving their performance for broader populations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become ubiquitous across various domains, transforming the way we interact with information and conduct research. However, most high-performing LLMs remain confined behind proprietary walls, hindering scientific progress. Most open-source LLMs, on the other hand, are limited in their ability to support longer sequence lengths, which is a key requirement for many tasks that require inference over an input context. To address this, we have trained XGen, a series of 7B parameter models on up to 8K sequence length for up to 1.5T tokens. We have also finetuned the XGen models on public-domain instructional data, creating their instruction-tuned counterparts (XGen-Inst). We open-source our models for both research advancements and commercial applications. Our evaluation on standard benchmarks shows that XGen models achieve comparable or better results when compared with state-of-the-art open-source LLMs. Our targeted evaluation on long sequence modeling tasks shows the benefits of our 8K-sequence models over 2K-sequence open-source LLMs.

Dataset curation has become a basis for strong large language model (LLM) performance. While various rule-based filtering heuristics exist for English and multilingual datasets, model-based filtering techniques have primarily focused on English. To address the disparity stemming from limited research on non-English languages, we propose a model-based filtering framework for multilingual datasets that aims to identify a diverse set of structured and knowledge-rich samples. Our approach emphasizes transparency, simplicity, and efficiency, leveraging Transformer- and FastText-based classifiers to ensure the broad accessibility of our technique and data. We conduct comprehensive ablation studies on the FineWeb-2 web crawl dataset across diverse language families, scripts, and resource availability to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Training a 1B-parameter Llama model for 70B and 119B tokens, our approach can match the baseline MMLU score with as little as 15% of the training tokens, while also improving across other benchmarks. These findings provide strong evidence for the generalizability of our approach to other languages. As a result, we extend our framework to 20 languages for which we release the refined pretraining datasets.

The Retrieval-Augmented Language Model (RALM) has shown remarkable performance on knowledge-intensive tasks by incorporating external knowledge during inference, which mitigates the factual hallucinations inherited in large language models (LLMs). Despite these advancements, challenges persist in the implementation of RALMs, particularly concerning their reliability and traceability. To be specific, the irrelevant document retrieval may result in unhelpful response generation or even deteriorate the performance of LLMs, while the lack of proper citations in generated outputs complicates efforts to verify the trustworthiness of the models. To this end, we propose a novel self-reasoning framework aimed at improving the reliability and traceability of RALMs, whose core idea is to leverage reasoning trajectories generated by the LLM itself. The framework involves constructing self-reason trajectories with three processes: a relevance-aware process, an evidence-aware selective process, and a trajectory analysis process. We have evaluated our framework across four public datasets (two short-form QA datasets, one long-form QA dataset, and one fact verification dataset) to demonstrate the superiority of our method, which can outperform existing state-of-art models and can achieve comparable performance with GPT-4, while only using 2,000 training samples.

The increasing size of large language models (LLMs) has introduced challenges in their training and inference. Removing model components is perceived as a solution to tackle the large model sizes, however, existing pruning methods solely focus on performance, without considering an essential aspect for the responsible use of LLMs: model fairness. It is crucial to address the fairness of LLMs towards diverse groups, such as women, Black people, LGBTQ+, Jewish communities, among others, as they are being deployed and available to a wide audience. In this work, first, we investigate how attention heads impact fairness and performance in pre-trained transformer-based language models. We then propose a novel method to prune the attention heads that negatively impact fairness while retaining the heads critical for performance, i.e. language modeling capabilities. Our approach is practical in terms of time and resources, as it does not require fine-tuning the final pruned, and fairer, model. Our findings demonstrate a reduction in gender bias by 19%, 19.5%, 39.5%, 34.7%, 23%, and 8% for DistilGPT-2, GPT-2, GPT-Neo of two different sizes, GPT-J, and Llama 2 models, respectively, in comparison to the biased model, with only a slight decrease in performance.

Language models can serve as a valuable tool for software developers to increase productivity. Large generative models can be used for code generation and code completion, while smaller encoder-only models are capable of performing code search tasks using natural language queries.These capabilities are heavily influenced by the quality and diversity of the available training data. Source code datasets used for training usually focus on the most popular languages and testing is mostly conducted on the same distributions, often overlooking low-resource programming languages. Motivated by the NLP generalization taxonomy proposed by Hupkes et.\,al., we propose a new benchmark dataset called GenCodeSearchNet (GeCS) which builds upon existing natural language code search datasets to systemically evaluate the programming language understanding generalization capabilities of language models. As part of the full dataset, we introduce a new, manually curated subset StatCodeSearch that focuses on R, a popular but so far underrepresented programming language that is often used by researchers outside the field of computer science. For evaluation and comparison, we collect several baseline results using fine-tuned BERT-style models and GPT-style large language models in a zero-shot setting.

This work investigates the ability of open Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict citation intent through in-context learning and fine-tuning. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on pre-trained models like SciBERT, which require extensive domain-specific pretraining and specialized architectures, we demonstrate that general-purpose LLMs can be adapted to this task with minimal task-specific data. We evaluate twelve model variations across five prominent open LLM families using zero, one, few, and many-shot prompting to assess performance across scenarios. Our experimental study identifies the top-performing model through extensive experimentation of in-context learning-related parameters, which we fine-tune to further enhance task performance. The results highlight the strengths and limitations of LLMs in recognizing citation intents, providing valuable insights for model selection and prompt engineering. Additionally, we make our end-to-end evaluation framework and models openly available for future use.

In recent years, pre-trained Multilingual Language Models (MLLMs) have shown a strong ability to transfer knowledge across different languages. However, given that the aspiration for such an ability has not been explicitly incorporated in the design of the majority of MLLMs, it is challenging to obtain a unique and straightforward explanation for its emergence. In this review paper, we survey literature that investigates different factors contributing to the capacity of MLLMs to perform zero-shot cross-lingual transfer and subsequently outline and discuss these factors in detail. To enhance the structure of this review and to facilitate consolidation with future studies, we identify five categories of such factors. In addition to providing a summary of empirical evidence from past studies, we identify consensuses among studies with consistent findings and resolve conflicts among contradictory ones. Our work contextualizes and unifies existing research streams which aim at explaining the cross-lingual potential of MLLMs. This review provides, first, an aligned reference point for future research and, second, guidance for a better-informed and more efficient way of leveraging the cross-lingual capacity of MLLMs.

Assessing the capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs) often requires the creation of ad-hoc evaluations. Currently, building new benchmarks requires tremendous amounts of manual work for each specific analysis. This makes the evaluation process tedious and costly. In this paper, we present APEx, Automatic Programming of Experiments, the first framework for automatic benchmarking of LMMs. Given a research question expressed in natural language, APEx leverages a large language model (LLM) and a library of pre-specified tools to generate a set of experiments for the model at hand, and progressively compile a scientific report. The report drives the testing procedure: based on the current status of the investigation, APEx chooses which experiments to perform and whether the results are sufficient to draw conclusions. Finally, the LLM refines the report, presenting the results to the user in natural language. Thanks to its modularity, our framework is flexible and extensible as new tools become available. Empirically, APEx reproduces the findings of existing studies while allowing for arbitrary analyses and hypothesis testing.

Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language model performance across a wide range of model scales -- from models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152 diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less benefit. We provide a holistic analysis of the training dataset and model's behaviour, covering the intersection of model scale with bias and toxicity. Finally we discuss the application of language models to AI safety and the mitigation of downstream harms.

Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to transfer knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model. Previous work applying KD in the field of large language models (LLMs) typically focused on the post-training phase, where the student LLM learns directly from instructions and corresponding responses generated by the teacher model. In this paper, we extend KD to the pre-training phase of LLMs, named pre-training distillation (PD). We first conduct a preliminary experiment using GLM-4-9B as the teacher LLM to distill a 1.9B parameter student LLM, validating the effectiveness of PD. Considering the key impact factors of distillation, we systematically explore the design space of pre-training distillation across four aspects: logits processing, loss selection, scaling law, and offline or online logits. We conduct extensive experiments to explore the design space of pre-training distillation and find better configurations and interesting conclusions, such as larger student LLMs generally benefiting more from pre-training distillation, while a larger teacher LLM does not necessarily guarantee better results. We hope our exploration of the design space will inform future practices in pre-training distillation.

Large language models (LMs) of code have recently shown tremendous promise in completing code and synthesizing code from natural language descriptions. However, the current state-of-the-art code LMs (e.g., Codex (Chen et al., 2021)) are not publicly available, leaving many questions about their model and data design decisions. We aim to fill in some of these blanks through a systematic evaluation of the largest existing models: Codex, GPT-J, GPT-Neo, GPT-NeoX-20B, and CodeParrot, across various programming languages. Although Codex itself is not open-source, we find that existing open-source models do achieve close results in some programming languages, although targeted mainly for natural language modeling. We further identify an important missing piece in the form of a large open-source model trained exclusively on a multi-lingual corpus of code. We release a new model, PolyCoder, with 2.7B parameters based on the GPT-2 architecture, which was trained on 249GB of code across 12 programming languages on a single machine. In the C programming language, PolyCoder outperforms all models including Codex. Our trained models are open-source and publicly available at https://github.com/VHellendoorn/Code-LMs, which enables future research and application in this area.

Despite the widespread adoption of Large language models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities remain limited to a few high-resource languages. Additionally, many low-resource languages (e.g. African languages) are often evaluated only on basic text classification tasks due to the lack of appropriate or comprehensive benchmarks outside of high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce IrokoBench -- a human-translated benchmark dataset for 16 typologically-diverse low-resource African languages covering three tasks: natural language inference~(AfriXNLI), mathematical reasoning~(AfriMGSM), and multi-choice knowledge-based QA~(AfriMMLU). We use IrokoBench to evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and translate-test settings~(where test sets are translated into English) across 10 open and four proprietary LLMs. Our evaluation reveals a significant performance gap between high-resource languages~(such as English and French) and low-resource African languages. We observe a significant performance gap between open and proprietary models, with the highest performing open model, Aya-101 only at 58\% of the best-performing proprietary model GPT-4o performance. Machine translating the test set to English before evaluation helped to close the gap for larger models that are English-centric, like LLaMa 3 70B. These findings suggest that more efforts are needed to develop and adapt LLMs for African languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language tasks, marking significant strides towards general artificial intelligence. While general artificial intelligence is leveraged by developing increasingly large-scale models, there could be another branch to develop lightweight custom models that better serve certain domains, taking into account the high cost of training and deploying LLMs and the scarcity of resources. In this paper, we present MindLLM, a novel series of bilingual lightweight large language models, trained from scratch, alleviating such burdens by offering models with 1.3 billion and 3 billion parameters. A thorough account of experiences accrued during large model development is given, covering every step of the process, including data construction, model architecture, evaluation, and applications. Such insights are hopefully valuable for fellow academics and developers. MindLLM consistently matches or surpasses the performance of other open-source larger models on some public benchmarks. We also introduce an innovative instruction tuning framework tailored for smaller models to enhance their capabilities efficiently. Moreover, we explore the application of MindLLM in specific vertical domains such as law and finance, underscoring the agility and adaptability of our lightweight models.

Large language models (LLMs) learn not only natural text generation abilities but also social biases against different demographic groups from real-world data. This poses a critical risk when deploying LLM-based applications. Existing research and resources are not readily applicable in South Korea due to the differences in language and culture, both of which significantly affect the biases and targeted demographic groups. This limitation requires localized social bias datasets to ensure the safe and effective deployment of LLMs. To this end, we present KO SB I, a new social bias dataset of 34k pairs of contexts and sentences in Korean covering 72 demographic groups in 15 categories. We find that through filtering-based moderation, social biases in generated content can be reduced by 16.47%p on average for HyperCLOVA (30B and 82B), and GPT-3.

Stable Diffusion revolutionised image creation from descriptive text. GPT-2, GPT-3(.5) and GPT-4 demonstrated astonishing performance across a variety of language tasks. ChatGPT introduced such language models to the general public. It is now clear that large language models (LLMs) are here to stay, and will bring about drastic change in the whole ecosystem of online text and images. In this paper we consider what the future might hold. What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear. We call this effect model dementia and show that it can occur in Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and LLMs. We build theoretical intuition behind the phenomenon and portray its ubiquity amongst all learned generative models. We demonstrate that it has to be taken seriously if we are to sustain the benefits of training from large-scale data scraped from the web. Indeed, the value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of content generated by LLMs in data crawled from the Internet.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 are versatile and capable of addressing a diverse range of tasks. However, general LLMs, which are developed on open-domain data, may lack the domain-specific knowledge essential for tasks in vertical domains, such as legal, medical, etc. To address this issue, previous approaches either conduct continuous pre-training with domain-specific data or employ retrieval augmentation to support general LLMs. Unfortunately, these strategies are either cost-intensive or unreliable in practical applications. To this end, we present a novel framework named BLADE, which enhances Black-box LArge language models with small Domain-spEcific models. BLADE consists of a black-box LLM and a small domain-specific LM. The small LM preserves domain-specific knowledge and offers specialized insights, while the general LLM contributes robust language comprehension and reasoning capabilities. Specifically, our method involves three steps: 1) pre-training the small LM with domain-specific data, 2) fine-tuning this model using knowledge instruction data, and 3) joint Bayesian optimization of the general LLM and the small LM. Extensive experiments conducted on public legal and medical benchmarks reveal that BLADE significantly outperforms existing approaches. This shows the potential of BLADE as an effective and cost-efficient solution in adapting general LLMs for vertical domains.

Advances in large language models (LLMs) have empowered a variety of applications. However, there is still a significant gap in research when it comes to understanding and enhancing the capabilities of LLMs in the field of mental health. In this work, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of multiple LLMs, including Alpaca, Alpaca-LoRA, FLAN-T5, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, on various mental health prediction tasks via online text data. We conduct a broad range of experiments, covering zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, and instruction fine-tuning. The results indicate a promising yet limited performance of LLMs with zero-shot and few-shot prompt designs for the mental health tasks. More importantly, our experiments show that instruction finetuning can significantly boost the performance of LLMs for all tasks simultaneously. Our best-finetuned models, Mental-Alpaca and Mental-FLAN-T5, outperform the best prompt design of GPT-3.5 (25 and 15 times bigger) by 10.9% on balanced accuracy and the best of GPT-4 (250 and 150 times bigger) by 4.8%. They further perform on par with the state-of-the-art task-specific language model. We also conduct an exploratory case study on LLMs' capability on the mental health reasoning tasks, illustrating the promising capability of certain models such as GPT-4. We summarize our findings into a set of action guidelines for potential methods to enhance LLMs' capability for mental health tasks. Meanwhile, we also emphasize the important limitations before achieving deployability in real-world mental health settings, such as known racial and gender bias. We highlight the important ethical risks accompanying this line of research.

Despite the great advance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in both instruction dataset building and benchmarking, the independence of training and evaluation makes current MLLMs hard to further improve their capability under the guidance of evaluation results with a relatively low human cost. In this paper, we propose MLLM-DataEngine, a novel closed-loop system that bridges data generation, model training, and evaluation. Within each loop iteration, the MLLM-DataEngine first analyze the weakness of the model based on the evaluation results, then generate a proper incremental dataset for the next training iteration and enhance the model capability iteratively. Compared with previous data collection methods which are separate from the benchmarking, the data generated by MLLM-DataEngine shows better targeting, quality, and correctness. For targeting, we propose an Adaptive Bad-case Sampling module, which adjusts the ratio of different types of data within each incremental dataset based on the benchmarking results. For quality, we resort to GPT-4 to generate high-quality data with each given data type. For correctness, prompt design is critical for the data generation results. Rather than previous hand-crafted prompt, we propose an Interactive Prompt Optimization strategy, which optimizes the prompt with the multi-round interaction between human and GPT, and improve the correctness of generated data greatly. Through extensive experiments, we find our MLLM-DataEngine could boost the MLLM capability in a targeted and automatic manner, with only a few human participation. We hope it could be a general solution for the following MLLMs building. The MLLM-DataEngine has been open-sourced and is now available at https://github.com/opendatalab/MLLM-DataEngine.

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has been witnessed in recent years. Based on the powerful LLMs, multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) extend the modality from text to a broader spectrum of domains, attracting widespread attention due to the broader range of application scenarios. As LLMs and MLLMs rely on vast amounts of model parameters and data to achieve emergent capabilities, the importance of data is receiving increasingly widespread attention and recognition. Tracing and analyzing recent data-oriented works for MLLMs, we find that the development of models and data is not two separate paths but rather interconnected. On the one hand, vaster and higher-quality data contribute to better performance of MLLMs, on the other hand, MLLMs can facilitate the development of data. The co-development of multi-modal data and MLLMs requires a clear view of 1) at which development stage of MLLMs can specific data-centric approaches be employed to enhance which capabilities, and 2) by utilizing which capabilities and acting as which roles can models contribute to multi-modal data. To promote the data-model co-development for MLLM community, we systematically review existing works related to MLLMs from the data-model co-development perspective. A regularly maintained project associated with this survey is accessible at https://github.com/modelscope/data-juicer/blob/main/docs/awesome_llm_data.md.

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). Domain specification techniques are key to make large language models disruptive in many applications. Specifically, to solve these hurdles, there has been a notable increase in research and practices conducted in recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs. This emerging field of study, with its substantial potential for impact, necessitates a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarize and guide ongoing work in this area. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on domain specification techniques for large language models, an emerging direction critical for large language model applications. First, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain-specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. Second, we present an extensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit dramatically from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Last, we offer our insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong generalization capabilities to novel tasks when prompted with language instructions and in-context demos. Since this ability sensitively depends on the quality of prompts, various methods have been explored to automate the instruction design. While these methods demonstrated promising results, they also restricted the searched prompt to one instruction. Such simplification significantly limits their capacity, as a single demo-free instruction might not be able to cover the entire complex problem space of the targeted task. To alleviate this issue, we adopt the Mixture-of-Expert paradigm and divide the problem space into a set of sub-regions; Each sub-region is governed by a specialized expert, equipped with both an instruction and a set of demos. A two-phase process is developed to construct the specialized expert for each region: (1) demo assignment: Inspired by the theoretical connection between in-context learning and kernel regression, we group demos into experts based on their semantic similarity; (2) instruction assignment: A region-based joint search of an instruction per expert complements the demos assigned to it, yielding a synergistic effect. The resulting method, codenamed Mixture-of-Prompts (MoP), achieves an average win rate of 81% against prior arts across several major benchmarks.

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered unprecedented advancements across diverse fields, ranging from natural language processing to computer vision and beyond. The prowess of LLMs is underpinned by their substantial model size, extensive and diverse datasets, and the vast computational power harnessed during training, all of which contribute to the emergent abilities of LLMs (e.g., in-context learning) that are not present in small models. Within this context, the mixture of experts (MoE) has emerged as an effective method for substantially scaling up model capacity with minimal computation overhead, gaining significant attention from academia and industry. Despite its growing prevalence, there lacks a systematic and comprehensive review of the literature on MoE. This survey seeks to bridge that gap, serving as an essential resource for researchers delving into the intricacies of MoE. We first briefly introduce the structure of the MoE layer, followed by proposing a new taxonomy of MoE. Next, we overview the core designs for various MoE models including both algorithmic and systemic aspects, alongside collections of available open-source implementations, hyperparameter configurations and empirical evaluations. Furthermore, we delineate the multifaceted applications of MoE in practice, and outline some potential directions for future research. To facilitate ongoing updates and the sharing of cutting-edge developments in MoE research, we have established a resource repository accessible at https://github.com/withinmiaov/A-Survey-on-Mixture-of-Experts.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), building upon the foundation of powerful large language models (LLMs), have recently demonstrated exceptional capabilities in generating not only texts but also images given interleaved multimodal inputs (acting like a combination of GPT-4V and DALL-E 3). However, existing MLLM benchmarks remain limited to assessing only models' comprehension ability of single image-text inputs, failing to keep up with the strides made in MLLMs. A comprehensive benchmark is imperative for investigating the progress and uncovering the limitations of current MLLMs. In this work, we categorize the capabilities of MLLMs into hierarchical levels from L_0 to L_4 based on the modalities they can accept and generate, and propose SEED-Bench-2, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates the hierarchical capabilities of MLLMs. Specifically, SEED-Bench-2 comprises 24K multiple-choice questions with accurate human annotations, which spans 27 dimensions, including the evaluation of both text and image generation. Multiple-choice questions with groundtruth options derived from human annotation enables an objective and efficient assessment of model performance, eliminating the need for human or GPT intervention during evaluation. We further evaluate the performance of 23 prominent open-source MLLMs and summarize valuable observations. By revealing the limitations of existing MLLMs through extensive evaluations, we aim for SEED-Bench-2 to provide insights that will motivate future research towards the goal of General Artificial Intelligence. Dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/AILab-CVC/SEED-Bench

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) can be tailored to adhere to human instructions through instruction tuning. However, due to shifts in the distribution of test-time data, they may not always execute instructions accurately, potentially generating factual errors or misaligned content when acting as chat assistants. To enhance the reliability of LLMs in following instructions, we propose the study of selective instruction following, whereby the system declines to execute instructions if the anticipated response quality is low. We train judge models that can predict numerical quality scores for model responses. To address data scarcity, we introduce Self-J, a novel self-training framework for developing judge models without needing human-annotated quality scores. Our method leverages the model's inherent self-evaluation capability to extract information about response quality from labeled instruction-tuning data. It incorporates a gold reference answer to facilitate self-evaluation and recalibrates by assessing the semantic similarity between the response sample and the gold reference. During the training phase, we implement self-distillation as a regularization technique to enhance the capability of reference-free estimation. To validate alignment evaluation on general instruction-following tasks, we collect large-scale high-quality instructions from HF中国镜像站 for model training and evaluation. Extensive experiments on five open-source models show that our method correlates much more with GPT-4 than strong baselines, e.g., supervised models distilled from GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-turbo. Our analysis shows our model's strong generalization across domains. Additionally, our judge models serve as good reward models, e.g., boosting WizardLM-13B-V1.2 from 89.17 to 92.48 and from 12.03 to 15.90 in version v1 and v2 of AlpacaEval respectively using best-of-32 sampling with our judge models.

Instruction tuning is widely recognized as a key technique for building generalist language models, which comes to the attention of researchers and the public with the release of InstructGPT ouyang2022training and ChatGPT [ https://chat.openai.com/ ]. Despite impressive progress in English-oriented large-scale language models (LLMs), it is still under-explored whether English-based foundation LLMs can perform similarly on multilingual tasks compared to English tasks with well-designed instruction tuning and how we can construct the corpora needed for the tuning. To remedy this gap, we propose the project as an attempt to create a Chinese instruction dataset by various methods adapted to the intrinsic characteristics of 4 sub-tasks. We collect around 200k Chinese instruction tuning samples, which have been manually checked to guarantee high quality. We also summarize the existing English and Chinese instruction corpora and brief some potential applications of the newly constructed Chinese instruction corpora.

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have emerged as frontrunners, showcasing unparalleled prowess in diverse applications, including answering queries, code generation, and more. Parallelly, graph-structured data, an intrinsic data type, is pervasive in real-world scenarios. Merging the capabilities of LLMs with graph-structured data has been a topic of keen interest. This paper bifurcates such integrations into two predominant categories. The first leverages LLMs for graph learning, where LLMs can not only augment existing graph algorithms but also stand as prediction models for various graph tasks. Conversely, the second category underscores the pivotal role of graphs in advancing LLMs. Mirroring human cognition, we solve complex tasks by adopting graphs in either reasoning or collaboration. Integrating with such structures can significantly boost the performance of LLMs in various complicated tasks. We also discuss and propose open questions for integrating LLMs with graph-structured data for the future direction of the field.

Language models can generate harmful and biased outputs and exhibit undesirable behavior according to a given cultural context. We propose a Process for Adapting Language Models to Society (PALMS) with Values-Targeted Datasets, an iterative process to significantly change model behavior by crafting and fine-tuning on a dataset that reflects a predetermined set of target values. We evaluate our process using three metrics: quantitative metrics with human evaluations that score output adherence to a target value, toxicity scoring on outputs; and qualitative metrics analyzing the most common word associated with a given social category. Through each iteration, we add additional training dataset examples based on observed shortcomings from evaluations. PALMS performs significantly better on all metrics compared to baseline and control models for a broad range of GPT-3 language model sizes without compromising capability integrity. We find that the effectiveness of PALMS increases with model size. We show that significantly adjusting language model behavior is feasible with a small, hand-curated dataset.

Transformer language models have received widespread public attention, yet their generated text is often surprising even to NLP researchers. In this survey, we discuss over 250 recent studies of English language model behavior before task-specific fine-tuning. Language models possess basic capabilities in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, world knowledge, and reasoning, but these capabilities are sensitive to specific inputs and surface features. Despite dramatic increases in generated text quality as models scale to hundreds of billions of parameters, the models are still prone to unfactual responses, commonsense errors, memorized text, and social biases. Many of these weaknesses can be framed as over-generalizations or under-generalizations of learned patterns in text. We synthesize recent results to highlight what is currently known about what large language models can and cannot do.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be capable of impressive few-shot generalisation to new tasks. However, they still tend to perform poorly on multi-step logical reasoning problems. Here we carry out a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs on 50 tasks that probe different aspects of logical reasoning. We show that language models tend to perform fairly well at single step inference or entailment tasks, but struggle to chain together multiple reasoning steps to solve more complex problems. In light of this, we propose a Selection-Inference (SI) framework that exploits pre-trained LLMs as general processing modules, and alternates between selection and inference to generate a series of interpretable, casual reasoning steps leading to the final answer. We show that a 7B parameter LLM used within the SI framework in a 5-shot generalisation setting, with no fine-tuning, yields a performance improvement of over 100% compared to an equivalent vanilla baseline on a suite of 10 logical reasoning tasks. The same model in the same setting even outperforms a significantly larger 280B parameter baseline on the same suite of tasks. Moreover, answers produced by the SI framework are accompanied by a causal natural-language-based reasoning trace, which has important implications for the safety and trustworthiness of the system.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered considerable interest within both academic and industrial. Yet, the application of LLMs to graph data remains under-explored. In this study, we evaluate the capabilities of four LLMs in addressing several analytical problems with graph data. We employ four distinct evaluation metrics: Comprehension, Correctness, Fidelity, and Rectification. Our results show that: 1) LLMs effectively comprehend graph data in natural language and reason with graph topology. 2) GPT models can generate logical and coherent results, outperforming alternatives in correctness. 3) All examined LLMs face challenges in structural reasoning, with techniques like zero-shot chain-of-thought and few-shot prompting showing diminished efficacy. 4) GPT models often produce erroneous answers in multi-answer tasks, raising concerns in fidelity. 5) GPT models exhibit elevated confidence in their outputs, potentially hindering their rectification capacities. Notably, GPT-4 has demonstrated the capacity to rectify responses from GPT-3.5-turbo and its own previous iterations. The code is available at: https://github.com/Ayame1006/LLMtoGraph.

We introduce Generalized Instruction Tuning (called GLAN), a general and scalable method for instruction tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike prior work that relies on seed examples or existing datasets to construct instruction tuning data, GLAN exclusively utilizes a pre-curated taxonomy of human knowledge and capabilities as input and generates large-scale synthetic instruction data across all disciplines. Specifically, inspired by the systematic structure in human education system, we build the taxonomy by decomposing human knowledge and capabilities to various fields, sub-fields and ultimately, distinct disciplines semi-automatically, facilitated by LLMs. Subsequently, we generate a comprehensive list of subjects for every discipline and proceed to design a syllabus tailored to each subject, again utilizing LLMs. With the fine-grained key concepts detailed in every class session of the syllabus, we are able to generate diverse instructions with a broad coverage across the entire spectrum of human knowledge and skills. Extensive experiments on large language models (e.g., Mistral) demonstrate that GLAN excels in multiple dimensions from mathematical reasoning, coding, academic exams, logical reasoning to general instruction following without using task-specific training data of these tasks. In addition, GLAN allows for easy customization and new fields or skills can be added by simply incorporating a new node into our taxonomy.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive abilities in interacting with visual content with myriad potential downstream tasks. However, even though a list of benchmarks has been proposed, the capabilities and limitations of MLLMs are still not comprehensively understood, due to a lack of a standardized and holistic evaluation framework. To this end, we present the first Comprehensive Evaluation Framework (ChEF) that can holistically profile each MLLM and fairly compare different MLLMs. First, we structure ChEF as four modular components, i.e., Scenario as scalable multimodal datasets, Instruction as flexible instruction retrieving formulae, Inferencer as reliable question answering strategies, and Metric as indicative task-specific score functions. Based on them, ChEF facilitates versatile evaluations in a standardized framework, and new evaluations can be built by designing new Recipes (systematic selection of these four components). Notably, current MLLM benchmarks can be readily summarized as recipes of ChEF. Second, we introduce 6 new recipes to quantify competent MLLMs' desired capabilities (or called desiderata, i.e., calibration, in-context learning, instruction following, language performance, hallucination, and robustness) as reliable agents that can perform real-world multimodal interactions. Third, we conduct a large-scale evaluation of 9 prominent MLLMs on 9 scenarios and 6 desiderata. Our evaluation summarized over 20 valuable observations concerning the generalizability of MLLMs across various scenarios and the composite capability of MLLMs required for multimodal interactions. We will publicly release all the detailed implementations for further analysis, as well as an easy-to-use modular toolkit for the integration of new recipes and models, so that ChEF can be a growing evaluation framework for the MLLM community.

Instruction tuning has been shown to be able to improve cross-task generalization of language models. However, it is still challenging for language models to complete the target tasks following the instructions, as the instructions are general and lack intermediate steps. To address this problem, we propose to incorporate the step-by-step instructions to help language models to decompose the tasks, which can provide the detailed and specific procedures for completing the target tasks. The step-by-step instructions are obtained automatically by prompting ChatGPT, which are further combined with the original instructions to tune language models. The extensive experiments on SUP-NATINST show that the high-quality step-by-step instructions can improve cross-task generalization across different model sizes. Moreover, the further analysis indicates the importance of the order of steps of the step-by-step instruction for the improvement. To facilitate future research, we release the step-by-step instructions and their human quality evaluation results.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved success in acting as agents, which interact with environments through tools like search engines. However, LLMs are not optimized specifically for tool use during training or alignment, limiting their effectiveness as agents. To resolve this problem, previous work has collected interaction trajectories between GPT-4 and environments, and fine-tuned smaller models with them. As part of this, the standard approach has been to simply discard trajectories that do not finish the task successfully, which, on the one hand, leads to a significant waste of data and resources, and on the other hand, has the potential to limit the possible optimization paths during fine-tuning. In this paper, we contend that large language models can learn from failures through appropriate data cleaning and fine-tuning strategies. We conduct experiments on mathematical reasoning, multi-hop question answering, and strategic question answering tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to solely using positive examples, incorporating negative examples enhances model performance by a large margin.

The increasing number of benchmarks for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in the computational job market domain highlights the demand for methods that can handle job-related tasks such as skill extraction, skill classification, job title classification, and de-identification. While some approaches have been developed that are specific to the job market domain, there is a lack of generalized, multilingual models and benchmarks for these tasks. In this study, we introduce a language model called ESCOXLM-R, based on XLM-R, which uses domain-adaptive pre-training on the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) taxonomy, covering 27 languages. The pre-training objectives for ESCOXLM-R include dynamic masked language modeling and a novel additional objective for inducing multilingual taxonomical ESCO relations. We comprehensively evaluate the performance of ESCOXLM-R on 6 sequence labeling and 3 classification tasks in 4 languages and find that it achieves state-of-the-art results on 6 out of 9 datasets. Our analysis reveals that ESCOXLM-R performs better on short spans and outperforms XLM-R on entity-level and surface-level span-F1, likely due to ESCO containing short skill and occupation titles, and encoding information on the entity-level.

Deep neural networks have become a powerful technique for learning representations from user-item interaction data in collaborative filtering (CF) for recommender systems. However, many existing methods heavily rely on unique user and item IDs, which limits their ability to perform well in practical zero-shot learning scenarios where sufficient training data may be unavailable. Inspired by the success of language models (LMs) and their strong generalization capabilities, a crucial question arises: How can we harness the potential of language models to empower recommender systems and elevate its generalization capabilities to new heights? In this study, we propose EasyRec - an effective and easy-to-use approach that seamlessly integrates text-based semantic understanding with collaborative signals. EasyRec employs a text-behavior alignment framework, which combines contrastive learning with collaborative language model tuning, to ensure a strong alignment between the text-enhanced semantic space and the collaborative behavior information. Extensive empirical evaluations across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of EasyRec compared to state-of-the-art alternative models, particularly in the challenging text-based zero-shot recommendation scenarios. Furthermore, the study highlights the potential of seamlessly integrating EasyRec as a plug-and-play component into text-enhanced collaborative filtering frameworks, thereby empowering existing recommender systems to elevate their recommendation performance and adapt to the evolving user preferences in dynamic environments. For better result reproducibility of our EasyRec framework, the model implementation details, source code, and datasets are available at the link: https://github.com/HKUDS/EasyRec.

In recent years, groundbreaking advancements in natural language processing have culminated in the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs), which have showcased remarkable capabilities across a vast array of domains, including the understanding, generation, and translation of natural language, and even tasks that extend beyond language processing. In this report, we delve into the performance of LLMs within the context of scientific discovery, focusing on GPT-4, the state-of-the-art language model. Our investigation spans a diverse range of scientific areas encompassing drug discovery, biology, computational chemistry (density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD)), materials design, and partial differential equations (PDE). Evaluating GPT-4 on scientific tasks is crucial for uncovering its potential across various research domains, validating its domain-specific expertise, accelerating scientific progress, optimizing resource allocation, guiding future model development, and fostering interdisciplinary research. Our exploration methodology primarily consists of expert-driven case assessments, which offer qualitative insights into the model's comprehension of intricate scientific concepts and relationships, and occasionally benchmark testing, which quantitatively evaluates the model's capacity to solve well-defined domain-specific problems. Our preliminary exploration indicates that GPT-4 exhibits promising potential for a variety of scientific applications, demonstrating its aptitude for handling complex problem-solving and knowledge integration tasks. Broadly speaking, we evaluate GPT-4's knowledge base, scientific understanding, scientific numerical calculation abilities, and various scientific prediction capabilities.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

Instruction-tuned large language models have revolutionized natural language processing and have shown great potential in applications such as conversational agents. These models, such as GPT-4, can not only master language but also solve complex tasks in areas like mathematics, coding, medicine, and law. Despite their impressive capabilities, there is still a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding their full potential, primarily due to the black-box nature of many models and the absence of holistic evaluation studies. To address these challenges, we present INSTRUCTEVAL, a more comprehensive evaluation suite designed specifically for instruction-tuned large language models. Unlike previous works, our evaluation involves a rigorous assessment of models based on problem-solving, writing ability, and alignment to human values. We take a holistic approach to analyze various factors affecting model performance, including the pretraining foundation, instruction-tuning data, and training methods. Our findings reveal that the quality of instruction data is the most crucial factor in scaling model performance. While open-source models demonstrate impressive writing abilities, there is substantial room for improvement in problem-solving and alignment. We are encouraged by the rapid development of models by the open-source community, but we also highlight the need for rigorous evaluation to support claims made about these models. Through INSTRUCTEVAL, we aim to foster a deeper understanding of instruction-tuned models and advancements in their capabilities. INSTRUCTEVAL is publicly available at https://github.com/declare-lab/instruct-eval.

Existing research has demonstrated that refining large language models (LLMs) through the utilization of machine-generated instruction-following data empowers these models to exhibit impressive zero-shot capabilities for novel tasks, without requiring human-authored instructions. In this paper, we systematically investigate, preprocess, and integrate three Chinese instruction-following datasets with the aim of enhancing the Chinese conversational capabilities of Mixtral-8x7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model. Through instruction fine-tuning on this carefully processed dataset, we successfully construct the Mixtral-8x7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model named "Aurora." To assess the performance of Aurora, we utilize three widely recognized benchmark tests: C-Eval, MMLU, and CMMLU. Empirical studies validate the effectiveness of instruction fine-tuning applied to Mixtral-8x7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model. This work is pioneering in the execution of instruction fine-tuning on a sparse expert-mixed model, marking a significant breakthrough in enhancing the capabilities of this model architecture. Our code, data and model are publicly available at https://github.com/WangRongsheng/Aurora

Medical systematic reviews can be very costly and resource intensive. We explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) can support and be trained to perform literature screening when provided with a detailed set of selection criteria. Specifically, we instruction tune LLaMA and Guanaco models to perform abstract screening for medical systematic reviews. Our best model, Bio-SIEVE, outperforms both ChatGPT and trained traditional approaches, and generalises better across medical domains. However, there remains the challenge of adapting the model to safety-first scenarios. We also explore the impact of multi-task training with Bio-SIEVE-Multi, including tasks such as PICO extraction and exclusion reasoning, but find that it is unable to match single-task Bio-SIEVE's performance. We see Bio-SIEVE as an important step towards specialising LLMs for the biomedical systematic review process and explore its future developmental opportunities. We release our models, code and a list of DOIs to reconstruct our dataset for reproducibility.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various natural language processing tasks, but leveraging them for dense passage embedding remains challenging. This is due to their causal attention mechanism and the misalignment between their pre-training objectives and the text ranking tasks. Despite some recent efforts to address these issues, existing frameworks for LLM-based text embeddings have been limited by their support for only a limited range of LLM architectures and fine-tuning strategies, limiting their practical application and versatility. In this work, we introduce the Unified framework for Large Language Model Embedding (ULLME), a flexible, plug-and-play implementation that enables bidirectional attention across various LLMs and supports a range of fine-tuning strategies. We also propose Generation-augmented Representation Learning (GRL), a novel fine-tuning method to boost LLMs for text embedding tasks. GRL enforces consistency between representation-based and generation-based relevance scores, leveraging LLMs' powerful generative abilities for learning passage embeddings. To showcase our framework's flexibility and effectiveness, we release three pre-trained models from ULLME with different backbone architectures, ranging from 1.5B to 8B parameters, all of which demonstrate strong performance on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark. Our framework is publicly available at: https://github.com/nlp-uoregon/ullme. A demo video for ULLME can also be found at https://rb.gy/ws1ile.

Although recent advances in scaling large language models (LLMs) have resulted in improvements on many NLP tasks, it remains unclear whether these models trained primarily with general web text are the right tool in highly specialized, safety critical domains such as clinical text. Recent results have suggested that LLMs encode a surprising amount of medical knowledge. This raises an important question regarding the utility of smaller domain-specific language models. With the success of general-domain LLMs, is there still a need for specialized clinical models? To investigate this question, we conduct an extensive empirical analysis of 12 language models, ranging from 220M to 175B parameters, measuring their performance on 3 different clinical tasks that test their ability to parse and reason over electronic health records. As part of our experiments, we train T5-Base and T5-Large models from scratch on clinical notes from MIMIC III and IV to directly investigate the efficiency of clinical tokens. We show that relatively small specialized clinical models substantially outperform all in-context learning approaches, even when finetuned on limited annotated data. Further, we find that pretraining on clinical tokens allows for smaller, more parameter-efficient models that either match or outperform much larger language models trained on general text. We release the code and the models used under the PhysioNet Credentialed Health Data license and data use agreement.

Long-context language models (LCLMs) have the potential to revolutionize our approach to tasks traditionally reliant on external tools like retrieval systems or databases. Leveraging LCLMs' ability to natively ingest and process entire corpora of information offers numerous advantages. It enhances user-friendliness by eliminating the need for specialized knowledge of tools, provides robust end-to-end modeling that minimizes cascading errors in complex pipelines, and allows for the application of sophisticated prompting techniques across the entire system. To assess this paradigm shift, we introduce LOFT, a benchmark of real-world tasks requiring context up to millions of tokens designed to evaluate LCLMs' performance on in-context retrieval and reasoning. Our findings reveal LCLMs' surprising ability to rival state-of-the-art retrieval and RAG systems, despite never having been explicitly trained for these tasks. However, LCLMs still face challenges in areas like compositional reasoning that are required in SQL-like tasks. Notably, prompting strategies significantly influence performance, emphasizing the need for continued research as context lengths grow. Overall, LOFT provides a rigorous testing ground for LCLMs, showcasing their potential to supplant existing paradigms and tackle novel tasks as model capabilities scale.

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.

While large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities in understanding complex queries and performing sophisticated tasks, their generalization abilities are often deeply entangled with memorization, necessitating more precise evaluation. To address this challenge, we introduce Scylla, a dynamic evaluation framework that quantitatively measures the generalization abilities of LLMs. Scylla disentangles generalization from memorization via assessing model performance on both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) data through 20 tasks across 5 levels of complexity. Through extensive experiments, we uncover a non-monotonic relationship between task complexity and the performance gap between ID and OOD data, which we term the generalization valley. Specifically, this phenomenon reveals a critical threshold - referred to as critical complexity - where reliance on non-generalizable behavior peaks, indicating the upper bound of LLMs' generalization capabilities. As model size increases, the critical complexity shifts toward higher levels of task complexity, suggesting that larger models can handle more complex reasoning tasks before over-relying on memorization. Leveraging Scylla and the concept of critical complexity, we benchmark 28LLMs including both open-sourced models such as LLaMA and Qwen families, and close-sourced models like Claude and GPT, providing a more robust evaluation and establishing a clearer understanding of LLMs' generalization capabilities.

Recently, there has been growing interest in extending the context length of instruction-following models in order to effectively process single-turn long input (e.g. summarizing a paper) and conversations with more extensive histories. While proprietary models such as GPT-4 and Claude have demonstrated considerable advancements in handling tens of thousands of tokens of context, open-sourced models are still in the early stages of experimentation. It also remains unclear whether developing these long context models can offer substantial gains on practical downstream tasks over retrieval-based methods or models simply trained on chunked contexts. To address this challenge, we propose to institute standardized evaluation for long context language models. Concretely, we develop L-Eval which contains 411 long documents and over 2,000 query-response pairs manually annotated and checked by the authors encompassing areas such as law, finance, school lectures, lengthy conversations, news, long-form novels, and meetings. L-Eval also adopts diverse evaluation methods and instruction styles, enabling a more reliable assessment of Long Context Language Models (LCLMs). Our findings indicate that while open-source models typically lag behind their commercial counterparts, they still exhibit impressive performance. LLaMA2 achieves the best results (win 45\% vs turbo-16k) on open-ended tasks with only 4k context length and ChatGLM2 achieves the best results on closed-ended tasks with 8k input tokens. We release our new evaluation suite, code, and all generation results including predictions from all open-sourced LCLMs, GPT4-32k, Cluade-100k at {https://github.com/OpenLMLab/LEval}.

Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance on a wide range of tasks such as question answering and code generation. On a high level, given an input, a language model can be used to automatically complete the sequence in a statistically-likely way. Based on this, users prompt these models with language instructions or examples, to implement a variety of downstream tasks. Advanced prompting methods can even imply interaction between the language model, a user, and external tools such as calculators. However, to obtain state-of-the-art performance or adapt language models for specific tasks, complex task- and model-specific programs have to be implemented, which may still require ad-hoc interaction. Based on this, we present the novel idea of Language Model Programming (LMP). LMP generalizes language model prompting from pure text prompts to an intuitive combination of text prompting and scripting. Additionally, LMP allows constraints to be specified over the language model output. This enables easy adaption to many tasks while abstracting language model internals and providing high-level semantics. To enable LMP, we implement LMQL(short for Language Model Query Language), which leverages the constraints and control flow from an LMP prompt to generate an efficient inference procedure that minimizes the number of expensive calls to the underlying language model. We show that LMQL can capture a wide range of state-of-the-art prompting methods in an intuitive way, especially facilitating interactive flows that are challenging to implement with existing high-level APIs. Our evaluation shows that we retain or increase the accuracy on several downstream tasks, while also significantly reducing the required amount of computation or cost in the case of pay-to-use APIs (26-85% cost savings).

Pretrained general-purpose language models can achieve state-of-the-art accuracies in various natural language processing domains by adapting to downstream tasks via zero-shot, few-shot and fine-tuning techniques. Because of their success, the size of these models has increased rapidly, requiring high-performance hardware, software, and algorithmic techniques to enable training such large models. As the result of a joint effort between Microsoft and NVIDIA, we present details on the training of the largest monolithic transformer based language model, Megatron-Turing NLG 530B (MT-NLG), with 530 billion parameters. In this paper, we first focus on the infrastructure as well as the 3D parallelism methodology used to train this model using DeepSpeed and Megatron. Next, we detail the training process, the design of our training corpus, and our data curation techniques, which we believe is a key ingredient to the success of the model. Finally, we discuss various evaluation results, as well as other interesting observations and new properties exhibited by MT-NLG. We demonstrate that MT-NLG achieves superior zero-, one-, and few-shot learning accuracies on several NLP benchmarks and establishes new state-of-the-art results. We believe that our contributions will help further the development of large-scale training infrastructures, large-scale language models, and natural language generations.

The pre-trained language models are continually fine-tuned to better support downstream applications. However, this operation may result in significant performance degeneration on general tasks beyond the targeted domain. To overcome this problem, we propose LM-Cocktail which enables the fine-tuned model to stay resilient in general perspectives. Our method is conducted in the form of model merging, where the fine-tuned language model is merged with the pre-trained base model or the peer models from other domains through weighted average. Despite simplicity, LM-Cocktail is surprisingly effective: the resulted model is able to achieve a strong empirical performance in the whole scope of general tasks while preserving a superior capacity in its targeted domain. We conduct comprehensive experiments with LLama and BGE model on popular benchmarks, including FLAN, MMLU, MTEB, whose results validate the efficacy of our proposed method. The code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding/tree/master/LM_Cocktail.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have become increasingly important due to their state-of-the-art performance and ability to integrate multiple data modalities, such as text, images, and audio, to perform complex tasks with high accuracy. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on personalized multimodal large language models, focusing on their architecture, training methods, and applications. We propose an intuitive taxonomy for categorizing the techniques used to personalize MLLMs to individual users, and discuss the techniques accordingly. Furthermore, we discuss how such techniques can be combined or adapted when appropriate, highlighting their advantages and underlying rationale. We also provide a succinct summary of personalization tasks investigated in existing research, along with the evaluation metrics commonly used. Additionally, we summarize the datasets that are useful for benchmarking personalized MLLMs. Finally, we outline critical open challenges. This survey aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and advance the development of personalized multimodal large language models.

We introduce LexBench, a comprehensive evaluation suite enabled to test language models (LMs) on ten semantic phrase processing tasks. Unlike prior studies, it is the first work to propose a framework from the comparative perspective to model the general semantic phrase (i.e., lexical collocation) and three fine-grained semantic phrases, including idiomatic expression, noun compound, and verbal construction. Thanks to \ourbenchmark, we assess the performance of 15 LMs across model architectures and parameter scales in classification, extraction, and interpretation tasks. Through the experiments, we first validate the scaling law and find that, as expected, large models excel better than the smaller ones in most tasks. Second, we investigate further through the scaling semantic relation categorization and find that few-shot LMs still lag behind vanilla fine-tuned models in the task. Third, through human evaluation, we find that the performance of strong models is comparable to the human level regarding semantic phrase processing. Our benchmarking findings can serve future research aiming to improve the generic capability of LMs on semantic phrase comprehension. Our source code and data are available at https://github.com/jacklanda/LexBench

While general-purpose large language models (LLMs) demonstrate proficiency on multiple tasks within the domain of translation, approaches based on open LLMs are competitive only when specializing on a single task. In this paper, we propose a recipe for tailoring LLMs to multiple tasks present in translation workflows. We perform continued pretraining on a multilingual mixture of monolingual and parallel data, creating TowerBase, followed by finetuning on instructions relevant for translation processes, creating TowerInstruct. Our final model surpasses open alternatives on several tasks relevant to translation workflows and is competitive with general-purpose closed LLMs. To facilitate future research, we release the Tower models, our specialization dataset, an evaluation framework for LLMs focusing on the translation ecosystem, and a collection of model generations, including ours, on our benchmark.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit emerging in-context learning abilities through prompt engineering. The recent progress in large-scale generative models has further expanded their use in real-world language applications. However, the critical challenge of improving the generalizability and factuality of LLMs in natural language understanding and question answering remains under-explored. While previous in-context learning research has focused on enhancing models to adhere to users' specific instructions and quality expectations, and to avoid undesired outputs, little to no work has explored the use of task-Specific fine-tuned Language Models (SLMs) to improve LLMs' in-context learning during the inference stage. Our primary contribution is the establishment of a simple yet effective framework that enhances the reliability of LLMs as it: 1) generalizes out-of-distribution data, 2) elucidates how LLMs benefit from discriminative models, and 3) minimizes hallucinations in generative tasks. Using our proposed plug-in method, enhanced versions of Llama 2 and ChatGPT surpass their original versions regarding generalizability and factuality. We offer a comprehensive suite of resources, including 16 curated datasets, prompts, model checkpoints, and LLM outputs across 9 distinct tasks. Our empirical analysis sheds light on the advantages of incorporating discriminative models into LLMs and highlights the potential of our methodology in fostering more reliable LLMs.

There are many Language Models for the English language according to its worldwide relevance. However, for the Spanish language, even if it is a widely spoken language, there are very few Spanish Language Models which result to be small and too general. Legal slang could be think of a Spanish variant on its own as it is very complicated in vocabulary, semantics and phrase understanding. For this work we gathered legal-domain corpora from different sources, generated a model and evaluated against Spanish general domain tasks. The model provides reasonable results in those tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in mainstream academic disciplines such as mathematics, physics, and computer science. However, human knowledge encompasses over 200 specialized disciplines, far exceeding the scope of existing benchmarks. The capabilities of LLMs in many of these specialized fields-particularly in light industry, agriculture, and service-oriented disciplines-remain inadequately evaluated. To address this gap, we present SuperGPQA, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates graduate-level knowledge and reasoning capabilities across 285 disciplines. Our benchmark employs a novel Human-LLM collaborative filtering mechanism to eliminate trivial or ambiguous questions through iterative refinement based on both LLM responses and expert feedback. Our experimental results reveal significant room for improvement in the performance of current state-of-the-art LLMs across diverse knowledge domains (e.g., the reasoning-focused model DeepSeek-R1 achieved the highest accuracy of 61.82% on SuperGPQA), highlighting the considerable gap between current model capabilities and artificial general intelligence. Additionally, we present comprehensive insights from our management of a large-scale annotation process, involving over 80 expert annotators and an interactive Human-LLM collaborative system, offering valuable methodological guidance for future research initiatives of comparable scope.

sec:abstract Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in assisting scientific discovery. However, such applications are currently limited by LLMs' deficiencies in understanding intricate scientific concepts, deriving symbolic equations, and solving advanced numerical calculations. To bridge these gaps, we introduce SciGLM, a suite of scientific language models able to conduct college-level scientific reasoning. Central to our approach is a novel self-reflective instruction annotation framework to address the data scarcity challenge in the science domain. This framework leverages existing LLMs to generate step-by-step reasoning for unlabelled scientific questions, followed by a process of self-reflective critic-and-revise. Applying this framework, we curated SciInstruct, a diverse and high-quality dataset encompassing mathematics, physics, chemistry, and formal proofs. We fine-tuned the ChatGLM family of language models with SciInstruct, enhancing their capabilities in scientific and mathematical reasoning. Remarkably, SciGLM consistently improves both the base model (ChatGLM3-6B-Base) and larger-scale models (12B and 32B), without sacrificing the language understanding capabilities of the base model. This makes SciGLM a suitable foundational model to facilitate diverse scientific discovery tasks. For the benefit of the wider research community, we release SciInstruct, SciGLM, alongside a self-reflective framework and fine-tuning code at https://github.com/THUDM/SciGLM.

Research on food image understanding using recipe data has been a long-standing focus due to the diversity and complexity of the data. Moreover, food is inextricably linked to people's lives, making it a vital research area for practical applications such as dietary management. Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, not only in their vast knowledge but also in their ability to handle languages naturally. While English is predominantly used, they can also support multiple languages including Japanese. This suggests that MLLMs are expected to significantly improve performance in food image understanding tasks. We fine-tuned open MLLMs LLaVA-1.5 and Phi-3 Vision on a Japanese recipe dataset and benchmarked their performance against the closed model GPT-4o. We then evaluated the content of generated recipes, including ingredients and cooking procedures, using 5,000 evaluation samples that comprehensively cover Japanese food culture. Our evaluation demonstrates that the open models trained on recipe data outperform GPT-4o, the current state-of-the-art model, in ingredient generation. Our model achieved F1 score of 0.531, surpassing GPT-4o's F1 score of 0.481, indicating a higher level of accuracy. Furthermore, our model exhibited comparable performance to GPT-4o in generating cooking procedure text.

Semi-structured tables are ubiquitous. There has been a variety of tasks that aim to automatically interpret, augment, and query tables. Current methods often require pretraining on tables or special model architecture design, are restricted to specific table types, or have simplifying assumptions about tables and tasks. This paper makes the first step towards developing open-source large language models (LLMs) as generalists for a diversity of table-based tasks. Towards that end, we construct TableInstruct, a new dataset with a variety of realistic tables and tasks, for instruction tuning and evaluating LLMs. We further develop the first open-source generalist model for tables, TableLlama, by fine-tuning Llama 2 (7B) with LongLoRA to address the long context challenge. We experiment under both in-domain setting and out-of-domain setting. On 7 out of 8 in-domain tasks, TableLlama achieves comparable or better performance than the SOTA for each task, despite the latter often has task-specific design. On 6 out-of-domain datasets, it achieves 6-48 absolute point gains compared with the base model, showing that training on TableInstruct enhances the model's generalizability. We will open-source our dataset and trained model to boost future work on developing open generalist models for tables.

Commercial large language models (LLMs), like OpenAI's GPT-4 powering ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus, have dominated natural language processing (NLP) benchmarks across different domains. New competing Open-Source alternatives like Mixtral 8x7B or Llama 3 have emerged and seem to be closing the gap while often offering higher throughput and being less costly to use. Open-Source LLMs can also be self-hosted, which makes them interesting for enterprise and clinical use cases where sensitive data should not be processed by third parties. We participated in the 12th BioASQ challenge, which is a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) setting, and explored the performance of current GPT models Claude 3 Opus, GPT-3.5-turbo and Mixtral 8x7b with in-context learning (zero-shot, few-shot) and QLoRa fine-tuning. We also explored how additional relevant knowledge from Wikipedia added to the context-window of the LLM might improve their performance. Mixtral 8x7b was competitive in the 10-shot setting, both with and without fine-tuning, but failed to produce usable results in the zero-shot setting. QLoRa fine-tuning and Wikipedia context did not lead to measurable performance gains. Our results indicate that the performance gap between commercial and open-source models in RAG setups exists mainly in the zero-shot setting and can be closed by simply collecting few-shot examples for domain-specific use cases. The code needed to rerun these experiments is available through GitHub.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have advanced graph structure understanding via recursive information exchange and aggregation among graph nodes. To improve model robustness, self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising approach for data augmentation. However, existing methods for generating pre-trained graph embeddings often rely on fine-tuning with specific downstream task labels, which limits their usability in scenarios where labeled data is scarce or unavailable. To address this, our research focuses on advancing the generalization capabilities of graph models in challenging zero-shot learning scenarios. Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs), we aim to develop a graph-oriented LLM that can achieve high generalization across diverse downstream datasets and tasks, even without any information available from the downstream graph data. In this work, we present the GraphGPT framework that aligns LLMs with graph structural knowledge with a graph instruction tuning paradigm. Our framework incorporates a text-graph grounding component to establish a connection between textual information and graph structures. Additionally, we propose a dual-stage instruction tuning paradigm, accompanied by a lightweight graph-text alignment projector. This paradigm explores self-supervised graph structural signals and task-specific graph instructions, to guide LLMs in understanding complex graph structures and improving their adaptability across different downstream tasks. Our framework is evaluated on supervised and zero-shot graph learning tasks, demonstrating superior generalization and outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

Recent work investigates whether LMs learn human-like linguistic generalizations and representations from developmentally plausible amounts of data. Yet, the basic linguistic units processed in these LMs are determined by subword-based tokenization, which limits their validity as models of learning at and below the word level. In this paper, we explore the potential of tokenization-free, phoneme- and grapheme-based language models. We demonstrate that small models based on the Llama architecture can achieve strong linguistic performance on standard syntactic and novel lexical/phonetic benchmarks when trained with character-level vocabularies. We further show that phoneme-based models almost match grapheme-based models in standard tasks and novel evaluations. Our findings suggest a promising direction for creating more linguistically plausible language models that are better suited for computational studies of language acquisition and processing.

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a driving force in transforming various domains, reshaping the artificial general intelligence landscape. However, the increasing computational and memory demands of these models present substantial challenges, hindering both academic research and practical applications. To address these issues, a wide array of methods, including both algorithmic and hardware solutions, have been developed to enhance the efficiency of LLMs. This survey delivers a comprehensive review of algorithmic advancements aimed at improving LLM efficiency. Unlike other surveys that typically focus on specific areas such as training or model compression, this paper examines the multi-faceted dimensions of efficiency essential for the end-to-end algorithmic development of LLMs. Specifically, it covers various topics related to efficiency, including scaling laws, data utilization, architectural innovations, training and tuning strategies, and inference techniques. This paper aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners, laying the groundwork for future innovations in this critical research area. Our repository of relevant references is maintained at url{https://github.com/tding1/Efficient-LLM-Survey}.

We introduce GPT-NeoX-20B, a 20 billion parameter autoregressive language model trained on the Pile, whose weights will be made freely and openly available to the public through a permissive license. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest dense autoregressive model that has publicly available weights at the time of submission. In this work, we describe 's architecture and training and evaluate its performance on a range of language-understanding, mathematics, and knowledge-based tasks. We find that GPT-NeoX-20B is a particularly powerful few-shot reasoner and gains far more in performance when evaluated five-shot than similarly sized GPT-3 and FairSeq models. We open-source the training and evaluation code, as well as the model weights, at https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neox.

Large language models (LLMs) have seen considerable advancements in natural language understanding tasks, yet there remains a gap to bridge before attaining true artificial general intelligence, especially concerning shortcomings in mathematical reasoning capabilities. We postulate that the inherent nature of LLM training, which focuses on predicting probabilities of next token, presents challenges in effectively modeling mathematical reasoning that demands exact calculations, both from data-driven and theoretical standpoints. In this paper, we address this challenge by enriching the data landscape and introducing a novel math dataset, enhanced with a capability to utilize a Python code interpreter. This dataset is derived from GSM8K and MATH and has been further refined through a combination of GPT-4 annotations, human review, and self-training processes, where the errors in the original GSM8K training set have been fixed. Additionally, we propose a tentative, easily replicable protocol for the fine-tuning of math-specific LLMs, which has led to a significant improvement in the performance of a 7B-parameter LLM on the GSM8K and MATH datasets. We are committed to advancing the field of mathematical reasoning in LLMs and, to that end, we have made the model checkpoints and will make the dataset publicly available. We hope this will facilitate further research and development within the community.

Language models, such as GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT, demonstrate remarkable abilities to follow diverse human instructions and perform a wide range of tasks. However, when probing language models using a range of basic table-understanding tasks, we observe that today's language models are still sub-optimal in many table-related tasks, likely because they are pre-trained predominantly on one-dimensional natural-language texts, whereas relational tables are two-dimensional objects. In this work, we propose a new "table-tuning" paradigm, where we continue to train/fine-tune language models like GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT, using diverse table-tasks synthesized from real tables as training data, with the goal of enhancing language models' ability to understand tables and perform table tasks. We show that our resulting Table-GPT models demonstrate (1) better table-understanding capabilities, by consistently outperforming the vanilla GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT, on a wide-range of table tasks, including holdout unseen tasks, and (2) strong generalizability, in its ability to respond to diverse human instructions to perform new table-tasks, in a manner similar to GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) represent an evolutionary expansion in the capabilities of traditional large language models, enabling them to tackle challenges that surpass the scope of purely text-based applications. It leverages the knowledge previously encoded within these language models, thereby enhancing their applicability and functionality in the reign of multimodal contexts. Recent works investigate the adaptation of MLLMs to predict free-form answers as a generative task to solve medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) tasks. In this paper, we propose a parameter efficient framework for fine-tuning MLLM specifically tailored to Med-VQA applications, and empirically validate it on a public benchmark dataset. To accurately measure the performance, we employ human evaluation and the results reveal that our model achieves an overall accuracy of 81.9%, and outperforms the GPT-4v model by a significant margin of 26% absolute accuracy on closed-ended questions. The code will be available here: https://github.com/jinlHe/PeFoMed.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional multitasking abilities, fine-tuning these models on downstream, domain-specific datasets is often necessary to yield superior performance on test sets compared to their counterparts without fine-tuning. However, the comprehensive effects of fine-tuning on the LLMs' generalization ability are not fully understood. This paper delves into the differences between original, unmodified LLMs and their fine-tuned variants. Our primary investigation centers on whether fine-tuning affects the generalization ability intrinsic to LLMs. To elaborate on this, we conduct extensive experiments across five distinct language tasks on various datasets. Our main findings reveal that models fine-tuned on generation and classification tasks exhibit dissimilar behaviors in generalizing to different domains and tasks. Intriguingly, we observe that integrating the in-context learning strategy during fine-tuning on generation tasks can enhance the model's generalization ability. Through this systematic investigation, we aim to contribute valuable insights into the evolving landscape of fine-tuning practices for LLMs.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly impacted various fields, from natural language processing to sectors like medicine and finance. However, despite their rapid proliferation, the applications of LLMs in telecommunications remain limited, often relying on general-purpose models that lack domain-specific specialization. This lack of specialization results in underperformance, particularly when dealing with telecommunications-specific technical terminology and their associated mathematical representations. This paper addresses this gap by first creating and disseminating Tele-Data, a comprehensive dataset of telecommunications material curated from relevant sources, and Tele-Eval, a large-scale question-and-answer dataset tailored to the domain. Through extensive experiments, we explore the most effective training techniques for adapting LLMs to the telecommunications domain, ranging from examining the division of expertise across various telecommunications aspects to employing parameter-efficient techniques. We also investigate how models of different sizes behave during adaptation and analyze the impact of their training data on this behavior. Leveraging these findings, we develop and open-source Tele-LLMs, the first series of language models ranging from 1B to 8B parameters, specifically tailored for telecommunications. Our evaluations demonstrate that these models outperform their general-purpose counterparts on Tele-Eval while retaining their previously acquired capabilities, thus avoiding the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon.

Although great progress has been made by previous table understanding methods including recent approaches based on large language models (LLMs), they rely heavily on the premise that given tables must be converted into a certain text sequence (such as Markdown or HTML) to serve as model input. However, it is difficult to access such high-quality textual table representations in some real-world scenarios, and table images are much more accessible. Therefore, how to directly understand tables using intuitive visual information is a crucial and urgent challenge for developing more practical applications. In this paper, we propose a new problem, multimodal table understanding, where the model needs to generate correct responses to various table-related requests based on the given table image. To facilitate both the model training and evaluation, we construct a large-scale dataset named MMTab, which covers a wide spectrum of table images, instructions and tasks. On this basis, we develop Table-LLaVA, a generalist tabular multimodal large language model (MLLM), which significantly outperforms recent open-source MLLM baselines on 23 benchmarks under held-in and held-out settings. The code and data is available at this https://github.com/SpursGoZmy/Table-LLaVA

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently gained immense popularity. Powerful commercial models like ChatGPT-4V and Gemini, as well as open-source ones such as LLaVA, are essentially general-purpose models and are applied to solve a wide variety of tasks, including those in computer vision. These neural networks possess such strong general knowledge and reasoning abilities that they have proven capable of working even on tasks for which they were not specifically trained. We compared the capabilities of the most powerful MLLMs to date: ShareGPT4V, ChatGPT, LLaVA-Next in a specialized task of age and gender estimation with our state-of-the-art specialized model, MiVOLO. We also updated MiVOLO and provide details and new metrics in this article. This comparison has yielded some interesting results and insights about the strengths and weaknesses of the participating models. Furthermore, we attempted various ways to fine-tune the ShareGPT4V model for this specific task, aiming to achieve state-of-the-art results in this particular challenge. Although such a model would not be practical in production, as it is incredibly expensive compared to a specialized model like MiVOLO, it could be very useful in some tasks, like data annotation.

Large language models (LLMs) offer promise in generating educational content, providing instructor feedback, and reducing teacher workload on assessments. While prior studies have focused on studying LLM-powered learning analytics, limited research has examined how effective LLMs are in a bilingual context. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of multilingual large language models (MLLMs) across monolingual (English-only, Spanish-only) and bilingual (Spanglish) student writing. We present a learning analytics use case that details LLM performance in assessing acceptable and unacceptable explanations of Science and Social Science concepts. Our findings reveal a significant bias in the grading performance of pre-trained models for bilingual writing compared to English-only and Spanish-only writing. Following this, we fine-tune open-source MLLMs including Llama 3.1 and Mistral NeMo using synthetic datasets generated in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. Our experiments indicate that the models perform significantly better for all three languages after fine-tuning with bilingual data. This study highlights the potential of enhancing MLLM effectiveness to support authentic language practices amongst bilingual learners. It also aims to illustrate the value of incorporating non-English languages into the design and implementation of language models in education.

As retrieval-augmented generation prevails in large language models, embedding models are becoming increasingly crucial. Despite the growing number of general embedding models, prior work often overlooks the critical role of training data quality. In this work, we introduce KaLM-Embedding, a general multilingual embedding model that leverages a large quantity of cleaner, more diverse, and domain-specific training data. Our model has been trained with key techniques proven to enhance performance: (1) persona-based synthetic data to create diversified examples distilled from LLMs, (2) ranking consistency filtering to remove less informative samples, and (3) semi-homogeneous task batch sampling to improve training efficacy. Departing from traditional BERT-like architectures, we adopt Qwen2-0.5B as the pre-trained model, facilitating the adaptation of auto-regressive language models for general embedding tasks. Extensive evaluations of the MTEB benchmark across multiple languages show that our model outperforms others of comparable size, setting a new standard for multilingual embedding models with <1B parameters.

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with reliably generating highly structured outputs, such as program code, mathematical formulas, or well-formed markup. Constrained decoding approaches mitigate this problem by greedily restricting what tokens an LLM can output at each step to guarantee that the output matches a given constraint. Specifically, in grammar-constrained decoding (GCD), the LLM's output must follow a given grammar. In this paper, we demonstrate that GCD techniques (and in general constrained decoding techniques) can distort the LLM's distribution, leading to outputs that are grammatical but appear with likelihoods that are not proportional to the ones given by the LLM, and so ultimately are low-quality. We call the problem of aligning sampling with a grammar constraint, grammar-aligned decoding (GAD), and propose adaptive sampling with approximate expected futures (ASAp), a decoding algorithm that guarantees the output to be grammatical while provably producing outputs that match the conditional probability of the LLM's distribution conditioned on the given grammar constraint. Our algorithm uses prior sample outputs to soundly overapproximate the future grammaticality of different output prefixes. Our evaluation on code generation and structured NLP tasks shows how ASAp often produces outputs with higher likelihood (according to the LLM's distribution) than existing GCD techniques, while still enforcing the desired grammatical constraints.

Benefiting from effective speech modeling, current Speech Large Language Models (SLLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in in-context speech generation and efficient generalization to unseen speakers. However, the prevailing information modeling process is encumbered by certain redundancies, leading to inefficiencies in speech generation. We propose Chain-of-Information Generation (CoIG), a method for decoupling semantic and perceptual information in large-scale speech generation. Building on this, we develop SpeechGPT-Gen, an 8-billion-parameter SLLM efficient in semantic and perceptual information modeling. It comprises an autoregressive model based on LLM for semantic information modeling and a non-autoregressive model employing flow matching for perceptual information modeling. Additionally, we introduce the novel approach of infusing semantic information into the prior distribution to enhance the efficiency of flow matching. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that SpeechGPT-Gen markedly excels in zero-shot text-to-speech, zero-shot voice conversion, and speech-to-speech dialogue, underscoring CoIG's remarkable proficiency in capturing and modeling speech's semantic and perceptual dimensions. Code and models are available at https://github.com/0nutation/SpeechGPT.

General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have achieved remarkable advancements in machine translation (MT) by leveraging extensive web content. On the other hand, translation-specific LLMs are built by pre-training on domain-specific monolingual corpora and fine-tuning with human-annotated translation data. Despite the superior performance, these methods either demand an unprecedented scale of computing and data or substantial human editing and annotation efforts. In this paper, we develop MT-Ladder, a novel model-agnostic and cost-effective tool to refine the performance of general LLMs for MT. MT-Ladder is trained on pseudo-refinement triplets which can be easily obtained from existing LLMs without additional human cost. During training, we propose a hierarchical fine-tuning strategy with an easy-to-hard schema, improving MT-Ladder's refining performance progressively. The trained MT-Ladder can be seamlessly integrated with any general-purpose LLMs to boost their translation performance. By utilizing Gemma-2B/7B as the backbone, MT-Ladder-2B can elevate raw translations to the level of top-tier open-source models (e.g., refining BigTranslate-13B with +6.91 BLEU and +3.52 COMET for XX-En), and MT-Ladder-7B can further enhance model performance to be on par with the state-of-the-art GPT-4. Extensive ablation and analysis corroborate the effectiveness of MT-Ladder in diverse settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/fzp0424/Ladder

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant interest in natural language processing (NLP), particularly their remarkable performance in various downstream tasks in resource-rich languages. Recent studies have highlighted the limitations of LLMs in low-resource languages, primarily focusing on binary classification tasks and giving minimal attention to South Asian languages. These limitations are primarily attributed to constraints such as dataset scarcity, computational costs, and research gaps specific to low-resource languages. To address this gap, we present datasets for sentiment and hate speech tasks by translating from English to Bangla, Hindi, and Urdu, facilitating research in low-resource language processing. Further, we comprehensively examine zero-shot learning using multiple LLMs in English and widely spoken South Asian languages. Our findings indicate that GPT-4 consistently outperforms Llama 2 and Gemini, with English consistently demonstrating superior performance across diverse tasks compared to low-resource languages. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that natural language inference (NLI) exhibits the highest performance among the evaluated tasks, with GPT-4 demonstrating superior capabilities.

The recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing, progressively broadening their scope to multimodal perception and generation. However, effectively integrating listening capabilities into LLMs poses significant challenges, particularly with respect to generalizing across varied contexts and executing complex auditory tasks. In this work, we introduce WavLLM, a robust and adaptive speech large language model with dual encoders, and a prompt-aware LoRA weight adapter, optimized by a two-stage curriculum learning approach. Leveraging dual encoders, we decouple different types of speech information, utilizing a Whisper encoder to process the semantic content of speech, and a WavLM encoder to capture the unique characteristics of the speaker's identity. Within the curriculum learning framework, WavLLM first builds its foundational capabilities by optimizing on mixed elementary single tasks, followed by advanced multi-task training on more complex tasks such as combinations of the elementary tasks. To enhance the flexibility and adherence to different tasks and instructions, a prompt-aware LoRA weight adapter is introduced in the second advanced multi-task training stage. We validate the proposed model on universal speech benchmarks including tasks such as ASR, ST, SV, ER, and also apply it to specialized datasets like Gaokao English listening comprehension set for SQA, and speech Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation set. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of speech tasks on the same model size, exhibiting robust generalization capabilities in executing complex tasks using CoT approach. Furthermore, our model successfully completes Gaokao tasks without specialized training. The codes, models, audio, and Gaokao evaluation set can be accessed at aka.ms/wavllm.

We present a new financial domain large language model, InvestLM, tuned on LLaMA-65B (Touvron et al., 2023), using a carefully curated instruction dataset related to financial investment. Inspired by less-is-more-for-alignment (Zhou et al., 2023), we manually curate a small yet diverse instruction dataset, covering a wide range of financial related topics, from Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam questions to SEC filings to Stackexchange quantitative finance discussions. InvestLM shows strong capabilities in understanding financial text and provides helpful responses to investment related questions. Financial experts, including hedge fund managers and research analysts, rate InvestLM's response as comparable to those of state-of-the-art commercial models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and Claude-2). Zero-shot evaluation on a set of financial NLP benchmarks demonstrates strong generalizability. From a research perspective, this work suggests that a high-quality domain specific LLM can be tuned using a small set of carefully curated instructions on a well-trained foundation model, which is consistent with the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis (Zhou et al., 2023). From a practical perspective, this work develops a state-of-the-art financial domain LLM with superior capability in understanding financial texts and providing helpful investment advice, potentially enhancing the work efficiency of financial professionals. We release the model parameters to the research community.

Large language models (LLMs) are a class of language models that have demonstrated outstanding performance across a range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks and have become a highly sought-after research area, because of their ability to generate human-like language and their potential to revolutionize science and technology. In this study, we conduct bibliometric and discourse analyses of scholarly literature on LLMs. Synthesizing over 5,000 publications, this paper serves as a roadmap for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to navigate the current landscape of LLMs research. We present the research trends from 2017 to early 2023, identifying patterns in research paradigms and collaborations. We start with analyzing the core algorithm developments and NLP tasks that are fundamental in LLMs research. We then investigate the applications of LLMs in various fields and domains including medicine, engineering, social science, and humanities. Our review also reveals the dynamic, fast-paced evolution of LLMs research. Overall, this paper offers valuable insights into the current state, impact, and potential of LLMs research and its applications.

Large language models are powerful systems that excel at many tasks, ranging from translation to mathematical reasoning. Yet, at the same time, these models often show unhuman-like characteristics. In the present paper, we address this gap and ask whether large language models can be turned into cognitive models. We find that -- after finetuning them on data from psychological experiments -- these models offer accurate representations of human behavior, even outperforming traditional cognitive models in two decision-making domains. In addition, we show that their representations contain the information necessary to model behavior on the level of individual subjects. Finally, we demonstrate that finetuning on multiple tasks enables large language models to predict human behavior in a previously unseen task. Taken together, these results suggest that large, pre-trained models can be adapted to become generalist cognitive models, thereby opening up new research directions that could transform cognitive psychology and the behavioral sciences as a whole.

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.

The capabilities of natural language models trained on large-scale data have increased immensely over the past few years. Open source libraries such as HuggingFace have made these models easily available and accessible. While prior research has identified biases in large language models, this paper considers biases contained in the most popular versions of these models when applied `out-of-the-box' for downstream tasks. We focus on generative language models as they are well-suited for extracting biases inherited from training data. Specifically, we conduct an in-depth analysis of GPT-2, which is the most downloaded text generation model on HuggingFace, with over half a million downloads per month. We assess biases related to occupational associations for different protected categories by intersecting gender with religion, sexuality, ethnicity, political affiliation, and continental name origin. Using a template-based data collection pipeline, we collect 396K sentence completions made by GPT-2 and find: (i) The machine-predicted jobs are less diverse and more stereotypical for women than for men, especially for intersections; (ii) Intersectional interactions are highly relevant for occupational associations, which we quantify by fitting 262 logistic models; (iii) For most occupations, GPT-2 reflects the skewed gender and ethnicity distribution found in US Labor Bureau data, and even pulls the societally-skewed distribution towards gender parity in cases where its predictions deviate from real labor market observations. This raises the normative question of what language models should learn - whether they should reflect or correct for existing inequalities.

As language models grow ever larger, the need for large-scale high-quality text datasets has never been more pressing, especially in multilingual settings. The BigScience workshop, a 1-year international and multidisciplinary initiative, was formed with the goal of researching and training large language models as a values-driven undertaking, putting issues of ethics, harm, and governance in the foreground. This paper documents the data creation and curation efforts undertaken by BigScience to assemble the Responsible Open-science Open-collaboration Text Sources (ROOTS) corpus, a 1.6TB dataset spanning 59 languages that was used to train the 176-billion-parameter BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual (BLOOM) language model. We further release a large initial subset of the corpus and analyses thereof, and hope to empower large-scale monolingual and multilingual modeling projects with both the data and the processing tools, as well as stimulate research around this large multilingual corpus.

Masked language model and autoregressive language model are two types of language models. While pretrained masked language models such as BERT overwhelm the line of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, autoregressive language models such as GPT are especially capable in natural language generation (NLG). In this paper, we propose a probabilistic masking scheme for the masked language model, which we call probabilistically masked language model (PMLM). We implement a specific PMLM with a uniform prior distribution on the masking ratio named u-PMLM. We prove that u-PMLM is equivalent to an autoregressive permutated language model. One main advantage of the model is that it supports text generation in arbitrary order with surprisingly good quality, which could potentially enable new applications over traditional unidirectional generation. Besides, the pretrained u-PMLM also outperforms BERT on a set of downstream NLU tasks.

Tabular data, a prevalent data type across various domains, presents unique challenges due to its heterogeneous nature and complex structural relationships. Achieving high predictive performance and robustness in tabular data analysis holds significant promise for numerous applications. Influenced by recent advancements in natural language processing, particularly transformer architectures, new methods for tabular data modeling have emerged. Early techniques concentrated on pre-training transformers from scratch, often encountering scalability issues. Subsequently, methods leveraging pre-trained language models like BERT have been developed, which require less data and yield enhanced performance. The recent advent of large language models, such as GPT and LLaMA, has further revolutionized the field, facilitating more advanced and diverse applications with minimal fine-tuning. Despite the growing interest, a comprehensive survey of language modeling techniques for tabular data remains absent. This paper fills this gap by providing a systematic review of the development of language modeling for tabular data, encompassing: (1) a categorization of different tabular data structures and data types; (2) a review of key datasets used in model training and tasks used for evaluation; (3) a summary of modeling techniques including widely-adopted data processing methods, popular architectures, and training objectives; (4) the evolution from adapting traditional Pre-training/Pre-trained language models to the utilization of large language models; (5) an identification of persistent challenges and potential future research directions in language modeling for tabular data analysis. GitHub page associated with this survey is available at: https://github.com/lanxiang1017/Language-Modeling-on-Tabular-Data-Survey.git.

In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities across numerous applications. However, the performance of these models in languages with fewer resources, such as Swedish, remains under-explored. This study introduces a comprehensive human benchmark to assess the efficacy of prominent LLMs in understanding and generating Swedish language texts using forced choice ranking. We employ a modified version of the ChatbotArena benchmark, incorporating human feedback to evaluate eleven different models, including GPT-4, GPT-3.5, various Claude and Llama models, and bespoke models like Dolphin-2.9-llama3b-8b-flashback and BeagleCatMunin. These models were chosen based on their performance on LMSYS chatbot arena and the Scandeval benchmarks. We release the chatbotarena.se benchmark as a tool to improve our understanding of language model performance in Swedish with the hopes that it will be widely used. We aim to create a leaderboard once sufficient data has been collected and analysed.

Large language models have advanced the state of the art in natural language processing. However, their predominant design for English or a limited set of languages creates a substantial gap in their effectiveness for low-resource languages. To bridge this gap, we introduce MaLA-500, a novel large language model designed to cover an extensive range of 534 languages. To train MaLA-500, we employ vocabulary extension and continued pretraining on LLaMA 2 with Glot500-c. Our experiments on SIB-200 show that MaLA-500 achieves state-of-the-art in-context learning results. We release MaLA-500 at https://huggingface.co/MaLA-LM

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing tasks and beyond. This success of LLMs has led to a large influx of research contributions in this direction. These works encompass diverse topics such as architectural innovations of the underlying neural networks, context length improvements, model alignment, training datasets, benchmarking, efficiency and more. With the rapid development of techniques and regular breakthroughs in LLM research, it has become considerably challenging to perceive the bigger picture of the advances in this direction. Considering the rapidly emerging plethora of literature on LLMs, it is imperative that the research community is able to benefit from a concise yet comprehensive overview of the recent developments in this field. This article provides that overview to the research community. It not only focuses on a systematic treatment of the existing literature on a broad range of LLM related concept, but also pays special attention to providing comprehensive summaries with extensive details about the individual existing models, datasets and major insights. We also pay heed to aligning our overview with the emerging outlook of this research direction by accounting for the other recently materializing reviews of the broader research direction of LLMs. Our self-contained comprehensive overview of LLMs discusses relevant background concepts along with covering the advanced topics at the frontier of this research direction. This review article is intended to not only provide a systematic survey, but also a quick comprehensive reference for the researchers and practitioners to draw insights from extensive informative summaries of the existing works to advance the LLM research direction.

With adversarial or otherwise normal prompts, existing large language models (LLM) can be pushed to generate toxic discourses. One way to reduce the risk of LLMs generating undesired discourses is to alter the training of the LLM. This can be very restrictive due to demanding computation requirements. Other methods rely on rule-based or prompt-based token elimination, which are limited as they dismiss future tokens and the overall meaning of the complete discourse. Here, we center detoxification on the probability that the finished discourse is ultimately considered toxic. That is, at each point, we advise against token selections proportional to how likely a finished text from this point will be toxic. To this end, we formally extend the dead-end theory from the recent reinforcement learning (RL) literature to also cover uncertain outcomes. Our approach, called rectification, utilizes a separate but significantly smaller model for detoxification, which can be applied to diverse LLMs as long as they share the same vocabulary. Importantly, our method does not require access to the internal representations of the LLM, but only the token probability distribution at each decoding step. This is crucial as many LLMs today are hosted in servers and only accessible through APIs. When applied to various LLMs, including GPT-3, our approach significantly improves the generated discourse compared to the base LLMs and other techniques in terms of both the overall language and detoxification performance.

Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across a variety of languages. However, efficacy can differ greatly between different language families, especially for those with limited linguistic resources. This report presents MERaLiON-TextLLM, a series of open-source language models specifically tailored to improve understanding and generation in Chinese, Indonesian, Malay, and Singlish. The initial released model is built on Llama-3-8B-Base and refined through a meticulously crafted process of continued pre-training and weight merging. Our approach achieves performance improvements across benchmarks in these languages, exceeding the capabilities of the official Llama-3 models. We provide the model checkpoints as a resource to support further research and development in cross-lingual language understanding.

We present SweCTRL-Mini, a large Swedish language model that can be used for inference and fine-tuning on a single consumer-grade GPU. The model is based on the CTRL architecture by Keskar, McCann, Varshney, Xiong, and Socher (2019), which means that users of the SweCTRL-Mini model can control the genre of the generated text by inserting special tokens in the generation prompts. SweCTRL-Mini is trained on a subset of the Swedish part of the mC4 corpus and a set of Swedish novels. In this article, we provide (1) a detailed account of the utilized training data and text pre-processing steps, to the extent that it is possible to check whether a specific phrase/source was a part of the training data, and (2) an evaluation of the model on both discriminative tasks, using automatic evaluation methods, and generative tasks, using human referees. We also compare the generative capabilities of the model with those of GPT-3. SweCTRL-Mini is fully open and available for download.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained popularity due to their impressive few-shot performance across various downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning all parameters and storing a unique model for each downstream task or domain becomes impractical because of the massive size of checkpoints (e.g., 350GB in GPT-3). Current literature, such as LoRA, showcases the potential of low-rank modifications to the original weights of an LLM, enabling efficient adaptation and storage for task-specific models. These methods can reduce the number of parameters needed to fine-tune an LLM by several orders of magnitude. Yet, these methods face two primary limitations: 1) the parameter reduction is lower-bounded by the rank one decomposition, and 2) the extent of reduction is heavily influenced by both the model architecture and the chosen rank. For instance, in larger models, even a rank one decomposition might exceed the number of parameters truly needed for adaptation. In this paper, we introduce NOLA, which overcomes the rank one lower bound present in LoRA. It achieves this by re-parameterizing the low-rank matrices in LoRA using linear combinations of randomly generated matrices (basis) and optimizing the linear mixture coefficients only. This approach allows us to decouple the number of trainable parameters from both the choice of rank and the network architecture. We present adaptation results using GPT-2 and ViT in natural language and computer vision tasks. NOLA performs as well as, or better than models with equivalent parameter counts. Furthermore, we demonstrate that we can halve the parameters in larger models compared to LoRA with rank one, without sacrificing performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold immense potential to generate synthetic data of high quality and utility, which has numerous applications from downstream model training to practical data utilisation. However, contemporary models, despite their impressive capacities, consistently struggle to produce both coherent and diverse data. To address the coherency issue, we introduce contrastive expert guidance, where the difference between the logit distributions of fine-tuned and base language models is emphasised to ensure domain adherence. In order to ensure diversity, we utilise existing real and synthetic examples as negative prompts to the model. We deem this dual-pronged approach to logit reshaping as STEER: Semantic Text Enhancement via Embedding Repositioning. STEER operates at inference-time and systematically guides the LLMs to strike a balance between adherence to the data distribution (ensuring semantic fidelity) and deviation from prior synthetic examples or existing real datasets (ensuring diversity and authenticity). This delicate balancing act is achieved by dynamically moving towards or away from chosen representations in the latent space. STEER demonstrates improved performance over previous synthetic data generation techniques, exhibiting better balance between data diversity and coherency across three distinct tasks: hypothesis generation, toxic and non-toxic comment generation, and commonsense reasoning task generation. We demonstrate how STEER allows for fine-tuned control over the diversity-coherency trade-off via its hyperparameters, highlighting its versatility.

Large language models (LLMs) are known to have the potential to generate harmful content, posing risks to users. While significant progress has been made in developing taxonomies for LLM risks and safety evaluation prompts, most studies have focused on monolingual contexts, primarily in English. However, language- and region-specific risks in bilingual contexts are often overlooked, and core findings can diverge from those in monolingual settings. In this paper, we introduce Qorgau, a novel dataset specifically designed for safety evaluation in Kazakh and Russian, reflecting the unique bilingual context in Kazakhstan, where both Kazakh (a low-resource language) and Russian (a high-resource language) are spoken. Experiments with both multilingual and language-specific LLMs reveal notable differences in safety performance, emphasizing the need for tailored, region-specific datasets to ensure the responsible and safe deployment of LLMs in countries like Kazakhstan. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation in data science offers substantial potential for enhancing tasks such as data manipulation, statistical analysis, and visualization. However, the effectiveness of these models in the data science domain remains underexplored. This paper presents a controlled experiment that empirically assesses the performance of four leading LLM-based AI assistants-Microsoft Copilot (GPT-4 Turbo), ChatGPT (o1-preview), Claude (3.5 Sonnet), and Perplexity Labs (Llama-3.1-70b-instruct)-on a diverse set of data science coding challenges sourced from the Stratacratch platform. Using the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach, we evaluated each model's effectiveness across task types (Analytical, Algorithm, Visualization) and varying difficulty levels. Our findings reveal that all models exceeded a 50% baseline success rate, confirming their capability beyond random chance. Notably, only ChatGPT and Claude achieved success rates significantly above a 60% baseline, though none of the models reached a 70% threshold, indicating limitations in higher standards. ChatGPT demonstrated consistent performance across varying difficulty levels, while Claude's success rate fluctuated with task complexity. Hypothesis testing indicates that task type does not significantly impact success rate overall. For analytical tasks, efficiency analysis shows no significant differences in execution times, though ChatGPT tended to be slower and less predictable despite high success rates. This study provides a structured, empirical evaluation of LLMs in data science, delivering insights that support informed model selection tailored to specific task demands. Our findings establish a framework for future AI assessments, emphasizing the value of rigorous evaluation beyond basic accuracy measures.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and have recently gained significant attention in the domain of Recommendation Systems (RS). These models, trained on massive amounts of data using self-supervised learning, have demonstrated remarkable success in learning universal representations and have the potential to enhance various aspects of recommendation systems by some effective transfer techniques such as fine-tuning and prompt tuning, and so on. The crucial aspect of harnessing the power of language models in enhancing recommendation quality is the utilization of their high-quality representations of textual features and their extensive coverage of external knowledge to establish correlations between items and users. To provide a comprehensive understanding of the existing LLM-based recommendation systems, this survey presents a taxonomy that categorizes these models into two major paradigms, respectively Discriminative LLM for Recommendation (DLLM4Rec) and Generative LLM for Recommendation (GLLM4Rec), with the latter being systematically sorted out for the first time. Furthermore, we systematically review and analyze existing LLM-based recommendation systems within each paradigm, providing insights into their methodologies, techniques, and performance. Additionally, we identify key challenges and several valuable findings to provide researchers and practitioners with inspiration. We have also created a GitHub repository to index relevant papers on LLMs for recommendation, https://github.com/WLiK/LLM4Rec.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced in integrating diverse modalities but frequently suffer from hallucination. A promising solution to mitigate this issue is to generate text with citations, providing a transparent chain for verification. However, existing work primarily focuses on generating citations for text-only content, overlooking the challenges and opportunities of multimodal contexts. To address this gap, we introduce MCiteBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate and analyze the multimodal citation text generation ability of MLLMs. Our benchmark comprises data derived from academic papers and review-rebuttal interactions, featuring diverse information sources and multimodal content. We comprehensively evaluate models from multiple dimensions, including citation quality, source reliability, and answer accuracy. Through extensive experiments, we observe that MLLMs struggle with multimodal citation text generation. We also conduct deep analyses of models' performance, revealing that the bottleneck lies in attributing the correct sources rather than understanding the multimodal content.

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.

While large language models (LLMs) have been successfully applied to various tasks, they still face challenges with hallucinations. Augmenting LLMs with domain-specific tools such as database utilities can facilitate easier and more precise access to specialized knowledge. In this paper, we present GeneGPT, a novel method for teaching LLMs to use the Web APIs of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) for answering genomics questions. Specifically, we prompt Codex to solve the GeneTuring tests with NCBI Web APIs by in-context learning and an augmented decoding algorithm that can detect and execute API calls. Experimental results show that GeneGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on eight tasks in the GeneTuring benchmark with an average score of 0.83, largely surpassing retrieval-augmented LLMs such as the new Bing (0.44), biomedical LLMs such as BioMedLM (0.08) and BioGPT (0.04), as well as GPT-3 (0.16) and ChatGPT (0.12). Our further analyses suggest that: (1) API demonstrations have good cross-task generalizability and are more useful than documentations for in-context learning; (2) GeneGPT can generalize to longer chains of API calls and answer multi-hop questions in GeneHop, a novel dataset introduced in this work; (3) Different types of errors are enriched in different tasks, providing valuable insights for future improvements.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation across various domains, including medicine. We present a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art LLM, on medical competency examinations and benchmark datasets. GPT-4 is a general-purpose model that is not specialized for medical problems through training or engineered to solve clinical tasks. Our analysis covers two sets of official practice materials for the USMLE, a three-step examination program used to assess clinical competency and grant licensure in the United States. We also evaluate performance on the MultiMedQA suite of benchmark datasets. Beyond measuring model performance, experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of test questions containing both text and images on model performance, probe for memorization of content during training, and study probability calibration, which is of critical importance in high-stakes applications like medicine. Our results show that GPT-4, without any specialized prompt crafting, exceeds the passing score on USMLE by over 20 points and outperforms earlier general-purpose models (GPT-3.5) as well as models specifically fine-tuned on medical knowledge (Med-PaLM, a prompt-tuned version of Flan-PaLM 540B). In addition, GPT-4 is significantly better calibrated than GPT-3.5, demonstrating a much-improved ability to predict the likelihood that its answers are correct. We also explore the behavior of the model qualitatively through a case study that shows the ability of GPT-4 to explain medical reasoning, personalize explanations to students, and interactively craft new counterfactual scenarios around a medical case. Implications of the findings are discussed for potential uses of GPT-4 in medical education, assessment, and clinical practice, with appropriate attention to challenges of accuracy and safety.

Despite a widespread success in various applications, large language models (LLMs) often stumble when tackling basic physical reasoning or executing robotics tasks, due to a lack of direct experience with the physical nuances of the real world. To address these issues, we propose a Grounding Large language model with Imperfect world MOdel (GLIMO), which utilizes proxy world models such as simulators to collect and synthesize trining data. GLIMO incorporates an LLM agent-based data generator to automatically create high-quality and diverse instruction datasets. The generator includes an iterative self-refining module for temporally consistent experience sampling, a diverse set of question-answering instruction seeds, and a retrieval-augmented generation module for reflecting on prior experiences. Comprehensive experiments show that our approach improve the performance of strong open-source LLMs like LLaMA-3 with a performance boost of 2.04 times, 1.54 times, and 1.82 times across three different benchmarks, respectively. The performance is able to compete with or surpass their larger counterparts such as GPT-4.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks in various domains. Despite their impressive performance, they can be unreliable due to factual errors in their generations. Assessing their confidence and calibrating them across different tasks can help mitigate risks and enable LLMs to produce better generations. There has been a lot of recent research aiming to address this, but there has been no comprehensive overview to organize it and outline the main lessons learned. The present survey aims to bridge this gap. In particular, we outline the challenges and we summarize recent technical advancements for LLM confidence estimation and calibration. We further discuss their applications and suggest promising directions for future work.

We present a method to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) and traditional tabular data classification techniques, addressing LLMs challenges like data serialization sensitivity and biases. We introduce two strategies utilizing LLMs for ranking categorical variables and generating priors on correlations between continuous variables and targets, enhancing performance in few-shot scenarios. We focus on Logistic Regression, introducing MonotonicLR that employs a non-linear monotonic function for mapping ordinals to cardinals while preserving LLM-determined orders. Validation against baseline models reveals the superior performance of our approach, especially in low-data scenarios, while remaining interpretable.

Large language models (LLMs) use pretraining to predict the subsequent word; however, their expansion requires significant computing resources. Numerous big tech companies and research institutes have developed multilingual LLMs (MLLMs) to meet current demands, overlooking less-resourced languages (LRLs). This study proposed three strategies to enhance the performance of LRLs based on the publicly available MLLMs. First, the MLLM vocabularies of LRLs were expanded to enhance expressiveness. Second, bilingual data were used for pretraining to align the high- and less-resourced languages. Third, a high-quality small-scale instruction dataset was constructed and instruction-tuning was performed to augment the LRL. The experiments employed the Llama2 model and Korean was used as the LRL, which was quantitatively evaluated against other developed LLMs across eight tasks. Furthermore, a qualitative assessment was performed based on human evaluation and GPT4. Experimental results showed that our proposed Bllossom model exhibited superior performance in qualitative analyses compared to previously proposed Korean monolingual models.

The rapid evolution of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has brought substantial advancements in artificial intelligence, significantly enhancing the capability to understand and generate multimodal content. While prior studies have largely concentrated on model architectures and training methodologies, a thorough analysis of the benchmarks used for evaluating these models remains underexplored. This survey addresses this gap by systematically reviewing 211 benchmarks that assess MLLMs across four core domains: understanding, reasoning, generation, and application. We provide a detailed analysis of task designs, evaluation metrics, and dataset constructions, across diverse modalities. We hope that this survey will contribute to the ongoing advancement of MLLM research by offering a comprehensive overview of benchmarking practices and identifying promising directions for future work. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers is available.

Recent studies indicate that NLU models are prone to rely on shortcut features for prediction, without achieving true language understanding. As a result, these models fail to generalize to real-world out-of-distribution data. In this work, we show that the words in the NLU training set can be modeled as a long-tailed distribution. There are two findings: 1) NLU models have strong preference for features located at the head of the long-tailed distribution, and 2) Shortcut features are picked up during very early few iterations of the model training. These two observations are further employed to formulate a measurement which can quantify the shortcut degree of each training sample. Based on this shortcut measurement, we propose a shortcut mitigation framework LTGR, to suppress the model from making overconfident predictions for samples with large shortcut degree. Experimental results on three NLU benchmarks demonstrate that our long-tailed distribution explanation accurately reflects the shortcut learning behavior of NLU models. Experimental analysis further indicates that LTGR can improve the generalization accuracy on OOD data, while preserving the accuracy on in-distribution data.

In production, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) are expected to support multi-turn queries of interchanging image and text modalities. However, the current MLLMs trained with visual-question-answering (VQA) datasets could suffer from degradation, as VQA datasets lack the diversity and complexity of the original text instruction datasets which the underlying language model had been trained with. To address this challenging degradation, we first collect a lightweight (6k entries) VQA preference dataset where answers were annotated by Gemini for 5 quality metrics in a granular fashion, and investigate standard Supervised Fine-tuning, rejection sampling, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and SteerLM. Our findings indicate that the with DPO we are able to surpass instruction-following capabilities of the language model, achieving a 6.73 score on MT-Bench, compared to Vicuna's 6.57 and LLaVA's 5.99 despite small data scale. This enhancement in textual instruction proficiency correlates with boosted visual instruction performance (+4.9\% on MM-Vet, +6\% on LLaVA-Bench), with minimal alignment tax on visual knowledge benchmarks compared to previous RLHF approach. In conclusion, we propose a distillation-based multi-modal alignment model with fine-grained annotations on a small dataset that reconciles the textual and visual performance of MLLMs, restoring and boosting language capability after visual instruction tuning.

State-of-the-art language models (LMs) are notoriously susceptible to generating hallucinated information. Such inaccurate outputs not only undermine the reliability of these models but also limit their use and raise serious concerns about misinformation and propaganda. In this work, we focus on hallucinated book and article references and present them as the "model organism" of language model hallucination research, due to their frequent and easy-to-discern nature. We posit that if a language model cites a particular reference in its output, then it should ideally possess sufficient information about its authors and content, among other relevant details. Using this basic insight, we illustrate that one can identify hallucinated references without ever consulting any external resources, by asking a set of direct or indirect queries to the language model about the references. These queries can be considered as "consistency checks." Our findings highlight that while LMs, including GPT-4, often produce inconsistent author lists for hallucinated references, they also often accurately recall the authors of real references. In this sense, the LM can be said to "know" when it is hallucinating references. Furthermore, these findings show how hallucinated references can be dissected to shed light on their nature. Replication code and results can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/hallucinated-references.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are commonly evaluated using costly annotated multimodal benchmarks. However, these benchmarks often struggle to keep pace with the rapidly advancing requirements of MLLM evaluation. We propose GenCeption, a novel and annotation-free MLLM evaluation framework that merely requires unimodal data to assess inter-modality semantic coherence and inversely reflects the models' inclination to hallucinate. Analogous to the popular DrawCeption game, GenCeption initiates with a non-textual sample and undergoes a series of iterative description and generation steps. Semantic drift across iterations is quantified using the GC@T metric. Our empirical findings validate GenCeption's efficacy, showing strong correlations with popular MLLM benchmarking results. GenCeption may be extended to mitigate training data contamination by utilizing ubiquitous, previously unseen unimodal data.

Prompted models have demonstrated impressive few-shot learning abilities. Repeated interactions at test-time with a single model, or the composition of multiple models together, further expands capabilities. These compositions are probabilistic models, and may be expressed in the language of graphical models with random variables whose values are complex data types such as strings. Cases with control flow and dynamic structure require techniques from probabilistic programming, which allow implementing disparate model structures and inference strategies in a unified language. We formalize several existing techniques from this perspective, including scratchpads / chain of thought, verifiers, STaR, selection-inference, and tool use. We refer to the resulting programs as language model cascades.

Large language models (LLMs) have received a lot of attention in natural language processing (NLP) research because of their exceptional performance in understanding and generating human languages. However, low-resource languages are left behind due to the unavailability of resources. In this work, we focus on enhancing the LLaMA-2-Amharic model by integrating task-specific and generative datasets to improve language model performance for Amharic. We compile an Amharic instruction fine-tuning dataset and fine-tuned LLaMA-2-Amharic model. The fine-tuned model shows promising results in different NLP tasks. We open-source our dataset creation pipeline, instruction datasets, trained models, and evaluation outputs to promote language-specific studies on these models.

Despite the widespread availability of LLMs, there remains a substantial gap in their capabilities and availability across diverse languages. One approach to address these issues has been to take an existing pre-trained LLM and continue to train it on new languages. While prior works have experimented with language adaptation, many questions around best practices and methodology have not been covered. In this paper, we present a comprehensive investigation into the adaptation of LLMs to new languages. Our study covers the key components in this process, including vocabulary extension, direct preference optimization and the data scarcity problem for human alignment in low-resource languages. We scale these experiments across 9 languages and 2 parameter scales (7B and 70B). We compare our models against Llama 2, Aya-101, XGLM, BLOOM and existing language experts, outperforming all prior published baselines. Additionally, all evaluation code and checkpoints are made public to facilitate future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant enhancements in instruction-following abilities through instruction tuning, achieving notable performances across various tasks. Previous research has focused on fine-tuning medical domain-specific LLMs using an extensive array of medical-specific data, incorporating millions of pieces of biomedical literature to augment their medical capabilities. However, existing medical instruction-tuned LLMs have been constrained by the limited scope of tasks and instructions available, restricting the efficacy of instruction tuning and adversely affecting performance in the general domain. In this paper, we fine-tune LLaMA-series models using 52k diverse, machine-generated, medical instruction-following data, MedInstruct-52k, resulting in the model AlpaCare. Comprehensive experimental results on both general and medical-specific domain free-form instruction evaluations showcase AlpaCare's strong medical proficiency and generalizability compared to previous instruction-tuned models in both medical and general domains. We provide public access to our MedInstruct-52k dataset and a clinician-crafted free-form instruction test set, MedInstruct-test, along with our codebase, to foster further research and development. Our project page is available at https://github.com/XZhang97666/AlpaCare.

Large language models have gained immense importance in recent years and have demonstrated outstanding results in solving various tasks. However, despite these achievements, many questions remain unanswered in the context of large language models. Besides the optimal use of the models for inference and the alignment of the results to the desired specifications, the transfer of models to other languages is still an underdeveloped area of research. The recent publication of models such as Llama-2 and Zephyr has provided new insights into architectural improvements and the use of human feedback. However, insights into adapting these techniques to other languages remain scarce. In this paper, we build on latest improvements and apply the Direct Preference Optimization(DPO) approach to the German language. The model is available at https://huggingface.co/DRXD1000/Phoenix.

Despite their impressive performance, large language models (LMs) still struggle with reliably generating complex output structures when not finetuned to follow the required output format exactly. To address this issue, grammar-constrained decoding (GCD) can be used to control the generation of LMs, guaranteeing that the output follows a given structure. Most existing GCD methods are, however, limited to specific tasks, such as parsing or code generation. In this work, we demonstrate that formal grammars can describe the output space for a much wider range of tasks and argue that GCD can serve as a unified framework for structured NLP tasks in general. For increased flexibility, we introduce input-dependent grammars, which allow the grammar to depend on the input and thus enable the generation of different output structures for different inputs. We then empirically demonstrate the power and flexibility of GCD-enhanced LMs on (1) information extraction, (2) entity disambiguation, and (3) constituency parsing. Our results indicate that grammar-constrained LMs substantially outperform unconstrained LMs or even beat task-specific finetuned models. Grammar constraints thus hold great promise for harnessing off-the-shelf LMs for a wide range of structured NLP tasks, especially where training data is scarce or finetuning is expensive. Code and data: https://github.com/epfl-dlab/GCD.

Multilingual language models have significantly advanced due to rapid progress in natural language processing. Models like BLOOM 1.7B, trained on diverse multilingual datasets, aim to bridge linguistic gaps. However, their effectiveness in capturing linguistic knowledge, particularly for low-resource languages, remains an open question. This study critically examines MLMs capabilities in multilingual understanding, semantic representation, and cross-lingual knowledge transfer. While these models perform well for high-resource languages, they struggle with less-represented ones. Additionally, traditional evaluation methods often overlook their internal syntactic and semantic encoding. This research addresses key limitations through three objectives. First, it assesses semantic similarity by analyzing multilingual word embeddings for consistency using cosine similarity. Second, it examines BLOOM-1.7B and Qwen2 through Named Entity Recognition and sentence similarity tasks to understand their linguistic structures. Third, it explores cross-lingual knowledge transfer by evaluating generalization from high-resource to low-resource languages in sentiment analysis and text classification. By leveraging linguistic probing, performance metrics, and visualizations, this study provides insights into the strengths and limitations of MLMs. The findings aim to enhance multilingual NLP models, ensuring better support for both high- and low-resource languages, thereby promoting inclusivity in language technologies.

We propose a method to control the attributes of Language Models (LMs) for the text generation task using Causal Average Treatment Effect (ATE) scores and counterfactual augmentation. We explore this method, in the context of LM detoxification, and propose the Causally Fair Language (CFL) architecture for detoxifying pre-trained LMs in a plug-and-play manner. Our architecture is based on a Structural Causal Model (SCM) that is mathematically transparent and computationally efficient as compared with many existing detoxification techniques. We also propose several new metrics that aim to better understand the behaviour of LMs in the context of toxic text generation. Further, we achieve state of the art performance for toxic degeneration, which are computed using \RTP (RTP) benchmark. Our experiments show that CFL achieves such a detoxification without much impact on the model perplexity. We also show that CFL mitigates the unintended bias problem through experiments on the BOLD dataset.

The crystallization of modeling methods around the Transformer architecture has been a boon for practitioners. Simple, well-motivated architectural variations can transfer across tasks and scale, increasing the impact of modeling research. However, with the emergence of state-of-the-art 100B+ parameters models, large language models are increasingly expensive to accurately design and train. Notably, it can be difficult to evaluate how modeling decisions may impact emergent capabilities, given that these capabilities arise mainly from sheer scale alone. In the process of building BLOOM--the Big Science Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual language model--our goal is to identify an architecture and training setup that makes the best use of our 1,000,000 A100-GPU-hours budget. Specifically, we perform an ablation study at the billion-parameter scale comparing different modeling practices and their impact on zero-shot generalization. In addition, we study the impact of various popular pre-training corpora on zero-shot generalization. We also study the performance of a multilingual model and how it compares to the English-only one. Finally, we consider the scaling behaviour of Transformers to choose the target model size, shape, and training setup. All our models and code are open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/bigscience .

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for transforming natural language questions into SQL queries (text-to-SQL) is a promising yet challenging approach, particularly when applied to real-world databases with complex and extensive schemas. In particular, effectively incorporating data catalogs and database values for SQL generation remains an obstacle, leading to suboptimal solutions. We address this problem by proposing a new pipeline that effectively retrieves relevant data and context, selects an efficient schema, and synthesizes correct and efficient SQL queries. To increase retrieval precision, our pipeline introduces a hierarchical retrieval method leveraging model-generated keywords, locality-sensitive hashing indexing, and vector databases. Additionally, we have developed an adaptive schema pruning technique that adjusts based on the complexity of the problem and the model's context size. Our approach generalizes to both frontier proprietary models like GPT-4 and open-source models such as Llama-3-70B. Through a series of ablation studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of each component of our pipeline and its impact on the end-to-end performance. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the cross-domain challenging BIRD dataset.

In recent times, substantial advancements have been witnessed in large language models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT, showcasing remarkable proficiency across a range of complex tasks. However, many mainstream LLMs (e.g. LLaMA) are pretrained on English-dominant corpus, which limits their performance in other non-English languages. In this paper, we focus on how to effectively transfer the capabilities of language generation and following instructions to a non-English language. To answer this question, we conduct an extensive empirical investigation based on LLaMA, accumulating over 1440 GPU hours. We analyze the impact of key factors such as vocabulary extension, further pretraining, and instruction tuning on transfer. To accurately assess the model's level of knowledge, we employ four widely used standardized testing benchmarks: C-Eval, MMLU, AGI-Eval, and GAOKAO-Bench. Furthermore, a comprehensive evaluation of the model's response quality is conducted, considering aspects such as accuracy, fluency, informativeness, logical coherence, and harmlessness, based on LLM-Eval, a benchmarks consisting instruction tasks from 17 diverse categories. Our evaluation results demonstrate that comparable performance to state-of-the-art transfer models can be achieved with less than 1% of the pretraining data, both in terms of knowledge alignment and response quality. Furthermore, the experimental outcomes across the thirteen low-resource languages also exhibit similar trends. We anticipate that the conclusions revealed by the experiments will aid the community in developing non-English LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have been used in some of the most widely deployed AI models to date, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, or Meta's LLaMA-2. While there has been significant work developing these methods, our understanding of the benefits and downsides of each stage in RLHF is still limited. To fill this gap, we present an extensive analysis of how each stage of the process (i.e. supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reward modelling, and RLHF) affects two key properties: out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation and output diversity. OOD generalisation is crucial given the wide range of real-world scenarios in which these models are being used, while output diversity refers to the model's ability to generate varied outputs and is important for a variety of use cases. We perform our analysis across two base models on both summarisation and instruction following tasks, the latter being highly relevant for current LLM use cases. We find that RLHF generalises better than SFT to new inputs, particularly as the distribution shift between train and test becomes larger. However, RLHF significantly reduces output diversity compared to SFT across a variety of measures, implying a tradeoff in current LLM fine-tuning methods between generalisation and diversity. Our results provide guidance on which fine-tuning method should be used depending on the application, and show that more research is needed to improve the trade-off between generalisation and diversity.

Large Language Models are expressive tools that enable complex tasks of text understanding within Computational Social Science. Their versatility, while beneficial, poses a barrier for establishing standardized best practices within the field. To bring clarity on the values of different strategies, we present an overview of the performance of modern LLM-based classification methods on a benchmark of 23 social knowledge tasks. Our results point to three best practices: select models with larger vocabulary and pre-training corpora; avoid simple zero-shot in favor of AI-enhanced prompting; fine-tune on task-specific data, and consider more complex forms instruction-tuning on multiple datasets only when only training data is more abundant.

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) recently has been a new rising research hotspot, which uses powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) as a brain to perform multimodal tasks. The surprising emergent capabilities of MLLM, such as writing stories based on images and OCR-free math reasoning, are rare in traditional methods, suggesting a potential path to artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we aim to trace and summarize the recent progress of MLLM. First of all, we present the formulation of MLLM and delineate its related concepts. Then, we discuss the key techniques and applications, including Multimodal Instruction Tuning (M-IT), Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL), Multimodal Chain of Thought (M-CoT), and LLM-Aided Visual Reasoning (LAVR). Finally, we discuss existing challenges and point out promising research directions. In light of the fact that the era of MLLM has only just begun, we will keep updating this survey and hope it can inspire more research. An associated GitHub link collecting the latest papers is available at https://github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models.

Large language models have been shown to achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language tasks using few-shot learning, which drastically reduces the number of task-specific training examples needed to adapt the model to a particular application. To further our understanding of the impact of scale on few-shot learning, we trained a 540-billion parameter, densely activated, Transformer language model, which we call Pathways Language Model PaLM. We trained PaLM on 6144 TPU v4 chips using Pathways, a new ML system which enables highly efficient training across multiple TPU Pods. We demonstrate continued benefits of scaling by achieving state-of-the-art few-shot learning results on hundreds of language understanding and generation benchmarks. On a number of these tasks, PaLM 540B achieves breakthrough performance, outperforming the finetuned state-of-the-art on a suite of multi-step reasoning tasks, and outperforming average human performance on the recently released BIG-bench benchmark. A significant number of BIG-bench tasks showed discontinuous improvements from model scale, meaning that performance steeply increased as we scaled to our largest model. PaLM also has strong capabilities in multilingual tasks and source code generation, which we demonstrate on a wide array of benchmarks. We additionally provide a comprehensive analysis on bias and toxicity, and study the extent of training data memorization with respect to model scale. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations related to large language models and discuss potential mitigation strategies.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains and are moving towards more specialized areas. Recent advanced proprietary models such as GPT-4 and Gemini have achieved significant advancements in biomedicine, which have also raised privacy and security challenges. The construction of specialized generalists hinges largely on high-quality datasets, enhanced by techniques like supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human or AI feedback, and direct preference optimization. However, these leading technologies (e.g., preference learning) are still significantly limited in the open source community due to the scarcity of specialized data. In this paper, we present the UltraMedical collections, which consist of high-quality manual and synthetic datasets in the biomedicine domain, featuring preference annotations across multiple advanced LLMs. By utilizing these datasets, we fine-tune a suite of specialized medical models based on Llama-3 series, demonstrating breathtaking capabilities across various medical benchmarks. Moreover, we develop powerful reward models skilled in biomedical and general reward benchmark, enhancing further online preference learning within the biomedical LLM community.

Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling (RALM) by integrating large language models (LLM) with relevant documents from an external corpus is a proven method for enabling the LLM to generate information beyond the scope of its pre-training corpus. Previous work using utilizing retrieved content by simply prepending retrieved contents to the input poses a high runtime issue, which degrades the inference efficiency of the LLMs because they fail to use the Key-Value (KV) cache efficiently. In this paper, we propose FlashBack, a modular RALM designed to improve the inference efficiency of RALM with appending context pattern while maintaining decent performance after specific fine-tuning without heavily destruct the knowledge integrity of the LLM. FlashBack appends retrieved documents at the end of the context for efficiently utilizing the KV cache instead of prepending them. Our experiment shows that the inference speed of FlashBack is up to 4times faster than the prepending method on a 7B LLM (Llama 2). Via bypassing unnecessary re-computation, it demonstrates an advancement by achieving significantly faster inference speed, and this heightened efficiency will substantially reduce inferential cost. Our code will be publicly available.

The legality of training language models (LMs) on copyrighted or otherwise restricted data is under intense debate. However, as we show, model performance significantly degrades if trained only on low-risk text (e.g., out-of-copyright books or government documents), due to its limited size and domain coverage. We present SILO, a new language model that manages this risk-performance tradeoff during inference. SILO is built by (1) training a parametric LM on Open License Corpus (OLC), a new corpus we curate with 228B tokens of public domain and permissively licensed text and (2) augmenting it with a more general and easily modifiable nonparametric datastore (e.g., containing copyrighted books or news) that is only queried during inference. The datastore allows use of high-risk data without training on it, supports sentence-level data attribution, and enables data producers to opt out from the model by removing content from the store. These capabilities can foster compliance with data-use regulations such as the fair use doctrine in the United States and the GDPR in the European Union. Our experiments show that the parametric LM struggles on domains not covered by OLC. However, access to the datastore greatly improves out of domain performance, closing 90% of the performance gap with an LM trained on the Pile, a more diverse corpus with mostly high-risk text. We also analyze which nonparametric approach works best, where the remaining errors lie, and how performance scales with datastore size. Our results suggest that it is possible to build high quality language models while mitigating their legal risk.

Large-scale language models (LLMs) has shown remarkable capability in various of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks and attracted lots of attention recently. However, some studies indicated that large language models fail to achieve promising result beyond the state-of-the-art models in English grammatical error correction (GEC) tasks. In this report, we aim to explore the how large language models perform on Chinese grammatical error correction tasks and provide guidance for future work. We conduct experiments with 3 different LLMs of different model scale on 4 Chinese GEC dataset. Our experimental results indicate that the performances of LLMs on automatic evaluation metrics falls short of the previous sota models because of the problem of over-correction. Furthermore, we also discover notable variations in the performance of LLMs when evaluated on different data distributions. Our findings demonstrates that further investigation is required for the application of LLMs on Chinese GEC task.

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used as simulacra for people, yet their ability to match the distribution of views of a specific demographic group and be distributionally aligned remains uncertain. This notion of distributional alignment is complex, as there is significant variation in the types of attributes that are simulated. Prior works have underexplored the role of three critical variables -- the question domain, steering method, and distribution expression method -- which motivates our contribution of a benchmark explicitly addressing these dimensions. We construct a dataset expanding beyond political values, create human baselines for this task, and evaluate the extent to which an LM can align with a particular group's opinion distribution to inform design choices of such simulation systems. Our analysis reveals open problems regarding if, and how, LMs can be used to simulate humans, and that LLMs can more accurately describe the opinion distribution than simulate such distributions.

Language models (LMs) automatically learn word embeddings during pre-training on language corpora. Although word embeddings are usually interpreted as feature vectors for individual words, their roles in language model generation remain underexplored. In this work, we theoretically and empirically revisit output word embeddings and find that their linear transformations are equivalent to steering language model generation styles. We name such steers LM-Steers and find them existing in LMs of all sizes. It requires learning parameters equal to 0.2% of the original LMs' size for steering each style. On tasks such as language model detoxification and sentiment control, LM-Steers can achieve comparable or superior performance compared with state-of-the-art controlled generation methods while maintaining a better balance with generation quality. The learned LM-Steer serves as a lens in text styles: it reveals that word embeddings are interpretable when associated with language model generations and can highlight text spans that most indicate the style differences. An LM-Steer is transferrable between different language models by an explicit form calculation. One can also continuously steer LMs simply by scaling the LM-Steer or compose multiple LM-Steers by adding their transformations. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/Glaciohound/LM-Steer.

Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) require massive amounts of text data, and the performance of the LLMs typically correlates with the scale and quality of the datasets. This means that it may be challenging to build LLMs for smaller languages such as Nordic ones, where the availability of text corpora is limited. In order to facilitate the development of the LLMS in the Nordic languages, we curate a high-quality dataset consisting of 1.2TB of text, in all of the major North Germanic languages (Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish), as well as some high-quality English data. This paper details our considerations and processes for collecting, cleaning, and filtering the dataset.

Recently, there has been a rapid advancement in research on Large Language Models (LLMs), resulting in significant progress in several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Consequently, there has been a surge in LLM evaluation research to comprehend the models' capabilities and limitations. However, much of this research has been confined to the English language, leaving LLM building and evaluation for non-English languages relatively unexplored. There has been an introduction of several new LLMs, necessitating their evaluation on non-English languages. This study aims to expand our MEGA benchmarking suite by including six new datasets to form the MEGAVERSE benchmark. The benchmark comprises 22 datasets covering 81 languages, including low-resource African languages. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT4, PaLM2, and Llama2 on the MEGAVERSE datasets. Additionally, we include two multimodal datasets in the benchmark and assess the performance of the LLaVa-v1.5 model. Our experiments suggest that GPT4 and PaLM2 outperform the Llama models on various tasks, notably on low-resource languages, with GPT4 outperforming PaLM2 on more datasets than vice versa. However, issues such as data contamination must be addressed to obtain an accurate assessment of LLM performance on non-English languages.

Detoxifying multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) has become crucial due to their increasing global use. In this work, we explore zero-shot cross-lingual generalization of preference tuning in detoxifying LLMs. Unlike previous studies that show limited cross-lingual generalization for other safety tasks, we demonstrate that Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) training with only English data can significantly reduce toxicity in multilingual open-ended generations. For example, the probability of mGPT-1.3B generating toxic continuations drops from 46.8% to 3.9% across 17 different languages after training. Our results also extend to other multilingual LLMs, such as BLOOM, Llama3, and Aya-23. Using mechanistic interpretability tools like causal intervention and activation analysis, we identified the dual multilinguality property of MLP layers in LLMs, which explains the cross-lingual generalization of DPO. Finally, we show that bilingual sentence retrieval can predict the cross-lingual transferability of DPO preference tuning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the pre-trained fine-tuning paradigm have become pivotal in solving natural language processing tasks, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance. Nevertheless, the theoretical understanding of how model complexity influences fine-tuning performance remains challenging and has not been well explored yet. In this paper, we focus on autoregressive LLMs and propose to employ Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to model them. Based on the HMM modeling, we investigate the relationship between model complexity and the generalization capability in downstream tasks. Specifically, we consider a popular tuning paradigm for downstream tasks, head tuning, where all pre-trained parameters are frozen and only individual heads are trained atop pre-trained LLMs. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the risk initially increases and then decreases with rising model complexity, showcasing a "double descent" phenomenon. In this case, the initial "descent" is degenerate, signifying that the "sweet spot" where bias and variance are balanced occurs when the model size is zero. Obtaining the presented in this study conclusion confronts several challenges, primarily revolving around effectively modeling autoregressive LLMs and downstream tasks, as well as conducting a comprehensive risk analysis for multivariate regression. Our research is substantiated by experiments conducted on data generated from HMMs, which provided empirical support and alignment with our theoretical insights.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved human-level performance on a range of professional and academic benchmarks. The accessibility of these models has lagged behind their performance. State-of-the-art LLMs require costly infrastructure; are only accessible via rate-limited, geo-locked, and censored web interfaces; and lack publicly available code and technical reports. In this paper, we tell the story of GPT4All, a popular open source repository that aims to democratize access to LLMs. We outline the technical details of the original GPT4All model family, as well as the evolution of the GPT4All project from a single model into a fully fledged open source ecosystem. It is our hope that this paper acts as both a technical overview of the original GPT4All models as well as a case study on the subsequent growth of the GPT4All open source ecosystem.

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and LLaMA, are creating significant advancements in natural language processing, due to their strong text encoding/decoding ability and newly found emergent capability (e.g., reasoning). While LLMs are mainly designed to process pure texts, there are many real-world scenarios where text data are associated with rich structure information in the form of graphs (e.g., academic networks, and e-commerce networks) or scenarios where graph data are paired with rich textual information (e.g., molecules with descriptions). Besides, although LLMs have shown their pure text-based reasoning ability, it is underexplored whether such ability can be generalized to graph scenarios (i.e., graph-based reasoning). In this paper, we provide a systematic review of scenarios and techniques related to large language models on graphs. We first summarize potential scenarios of adopting LLMs on graphs into three categories, namely pure graphs, text-rich graphs, and text-paired graphs. We then discuss detailed techniques for utilizing LLMs on graphs, including LLM as Predictor, LLM as Encoder, and LLM as Aligner, and compare the advantages and disadvantages of different schools of models. Furthermore, we mention the real-world applications of such methods and summarize open-source codes and benchmark datasets. Finally, we conclude with potential future research directions in this fast-growing field. The related source can be found at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Awesome-Language-Model-on-Graphs.

As language models (LMs) become increasingly powerful, it is important to quantify and compare them for sociodemographic bias with potential for harm. Prior bias measurement datasets are sensitive to perturbations in their manually designed templates, therefore unreliable. To achieve reliability, we introduce the Comprehensive Assessment of Language Model bias (CALM), a benchmark dataset to quantify bias in LMs across three tasks. We integrate 16 existing datasets across different domains, such as Wikipedia and news articles, to filter 224 templates from which we construct a dataset of 78,400 examples. We compare the diversity of CALM with prior datasets on metrics such as average semantic similarity, and variation in template length, and test the sensitivity to small perturbations. We show that our dataset is more diverse and reliable than previous datasets, thus better capture the breadth of linguistic variation required to reliably evaluate model bias. We evaluate 20 large language models including six prominent families of LMs such as Llama-2. In two LM series, OPT and Bloom, we found that larger parameter models are more biased than lower parameter models. We found the T0 series of models to be the least biased. Furthermore, we noticed a tradeoff between gender and racial bias with increasing model size in some model series. The code is available at https://github.com/vipulgupta1011/CALM.

The recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has heralded a new era of human-AI interaction. These sophisticated models, exemplified by Chat-GPT and its successors, have exhibited remarkable capabilities in language understanding. However, as these LLMs have undergone exponential growth, a crucial dimension that remains understudied is the personalization of these models. Large foundation models such as GPT-3 etc. focus on creating a universal model that serves a broad range of tasks and users. This approach emphasizes the model's generalization capabilities, treating users as a collective rather than as distinct individuals. While practical for many common applications, this one-size-fits-all approach often fails to address the rich tapestry of human diversity and individual needs. To explore this issue we introduce the PEFT-U Benchmark: a new dataset for building and evaluating NLP models for user personalization. consists of a series of user-centered tasks containing diverse and individualized expressions where the preferences of users can potentially differ for the same input. Using PEFT-U, we explore the challenge of efficiently personalizing LLMs to accommodate user-specific preferences in the context of diverse user-centered tasks.

The ability to generate SQL queries from natural language has significant implications for making data accessible to non-specialists. This paper presents a novel approach to fine-tuning open-source large language models (LLMs) for the task of transforming natural language into SQL queries within the retail domain. We introduce models specialized in generating SQL queries, trained on synthetic datasets tailored to the Snowflake SQL and GoogleSQL dialects. Our methodology involves generating a context-specific dataset using GPT-4, then fine-tuning three open-source LLMs(Starcoder Plus, Code-Llama, and Mistral) employing the LoRa technique to optimize for resource constraints. The fine-tuned models demonstrate superior performance in zero-shot settings compared to the baseline GPT-4, with Code-Llama achieving the highest accuracy rates, at 81.58% for Snowflake SQL and 82.66% for GoogleSQL. These results underscore the effectiveness of fine-tuning LLMs on domain-specific tasks and suggest a promising direction for enhancing the accessibility of relational databases through natural language interfaces.

Visual language models (VLMs) have rapidly progressed, driven by the success of large language models (LLMs). While model architectures and training infrastructures advance rapidly, data curation remains under-explored. When data quantity and quality become a bottleneck, existing work either directly crawls more raw data from the Internet that does not have a guarantee of data quality or distills from black-box commercial models (e.g., GPT-4V / Gemini) causing the performance upper bounded by that model. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that includes a self-augment step and a specialist-augment step to iteratively improve data quality and model performance. In the self-augment step, a VLM recaptions its own pretraining data to enhance data quality, and then retrains from scratch using this refined dataset to improve model performance. This process can iterate for several rounds. Once self-augmentation saturates, we employ several specialist VLMs finetuned from the self-augmented VLM with domain-specific expertise, to further infuse specialist knowledge into the generalist VLM through task-oriented recaptioning and retraining. With the combined self-augmented and specialist-augmented training, we introduce VILA^2 (VILA-augmented-VILA), a VLM family that consistently improves the accuracy on a wide range of tasks over prior art, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on MMMU leaderboard among open-sourced models.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, LLaMA, GLM, and PaLM, have exhibited remarkable performances across various tasks in recent years. However, LLMs face two main challenges in real-world applications. One challenge is that training LLMs consumes vast computing resources, preventing LLMs from being adopted by small and medium-sized enterprises with limited computing resources. Another is that training LLM requires a large amount of high-quality data, which are often scattered among enterprises. To address these challenges, we propose FATE-LLM, an industrial-grade federated learning framework for large language models. FATE-LLM (1) facilitates federated learning for large language models (coined FedLLM); (2) promotes efficient training of FedLLM using parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods; (3) protects the intellectual property of LLMs; (4) preserves data privacy during training and inference through privacy-preserving mechanisms. We release the code of FATE-LLM at https://github.com/FederatedAI/FATE-LLM to facilitate the research of FedLLM and enable a broad range of industrial applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have demonstrated remarkable abilities across diverse tasks, especially as they are scaled up. Nevertheless, even state-of-the-art models struggle in certain cases, sometimes failing at problems solvable by young children, indicating that traditional notions of task complexity are insufficient for explaining LLM capabilities. However, exploring LLM capabilities is complicated by the fact that most widely-used models are also "instruction-tuned" to respond appropriately to prompts. With the goal of disentangling the factors influencing LLM performance, we investigate whether instruction-tuned models possess fundamentally different capabilities from base models that are prompted using in-context examples. Through extensive experiments across various model families, scales and task types, which included instruction tuning 90 different LLMs, we demonstrate that the performance of instruction-tuned models is significantly correlated with the in-context performance of their base counterparts. By clarifying what instruction-tuning contributes, we extend prior research into in-context learning, which suggests that base models use priors from pretraining data to solve tasks. Specifically, we extend this understanding to instruction-tuned models, suggesting that their pretraining data similarly sets a limiting boundary on the tasks they can solve, with the added influence of the instruction-tuning dataset.

Recently, Instruction fine-tuning has risen to prominence as a potential method for enhancing the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on novel tasks. This technique has shown an exceptional ability to boost the performance of moderately sized LLMs, sometimes even reaching performance levels comparable to those of much larger model variants. The focus is on the robustness of instruction-tuned LLMs to seen and unseen tasks. We conducted an exploration of six models including Alpaca, Vicuna, WizardLM, and Traditional Task-oriented Models(Flan-T5-XL/XXL, T0++) using real-world relation extraction datasets as case studies. We carried out a comprehensive evaluation of these instruction-following LLMs which have been tuned based on open-domain instructions and task-oriented instructions. The main discussion is their performance and robustness towards instructions. We have observed that in most cases, the model's performance in dealing with unfamiliar instructions tends to worsen significantly, and the robustness of the model for RE instructions deteriorates compared to QA. Further, we discovered that up until a certain parameter size threshold (3B), the performance of the FLAN-T5 model improves as the parameter count increases. The robustness of different scales of FLAN-T5 models to RE instruction is worse than the robustness to QA instruction.

The number of Language Models (LMs) dedicated to processing scientific text is on the rise. Keeping pace with the rapid growth of scientific LMs (SciLMs) has become a daunting task for researchers. To date, no comprehensive surveys on SciLMs have been undertaken, leaving this issue unaddressed. Given the constant stream of new SciLMs, appraising the state-of-the-art and how they compare to each other remain largely unknown. This work fills that gap and provides a comprehensive review of SciLMs, including an extensive analysis of their effectiveness across different domains, tasks and datasets, and a discussion on the challenges that lie ahead.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, have revolutionized natural language processing research and demonstrated potential in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, the expensive training and deployment of LLMs present challenges to transparent and open academic research. To address these issues, this project open-sources the Chinese LLaMA and Alpaca large models, emphasizing instruction fine-tuning. We expand the original LLaMA's Chinese vocabulary by adding 20K Chinese tokens, increasing encoding efficiency and enhancing basic semantic understanding. By incorporating secondary pre-training using Chinese data and fine-tuning with Chinese instruction data, we substantially improve the models' comprehension and execution of instructions. Our pilot study serves as a foundation for researchers adapting LLaMA and Alpaca models to other languages. Resources are made publicly available through GitHub, fostering open research in the Chinese NLP community and beyond. GitHub repository: https://github.com/ymcui/Chinese-LLaMA-Alpaca

Prior work has shown that finetuning large language models (LLMs) using machine-generated instruction-following data enables such models to achieve remarkable zero-shot capabilities on new tasks, and no human-written instructions are needed. In this paper, we present the first attempt to use GPT-4 to generate instruction-following data for LLM finetuning. Our early experiments on instruction-tuned LLaMA models show that the 52K English and Chinese instruction-following data generated by GPT-4 leads to superior zero-shot performance on new tasks to the instruction-following data generated by previous state-of-the-art models. We also collect feedback and comparison data from GPT-4 to enable a comprehensive evaluation and reward model training. We make our data generated using GPT-4 as well as our codebase publicly available.

The world's more than 7000 languages are written in at least 293 scripts. Due to various reasons, many closely related languages use different scripts, which poses a difficulty for multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) in learning crosslingual knowledge through lexical overlap. As a consequence, mPLMs are faced with a script barrier: representations from different scripts are located in different subspaces, which can result in crosslingual transfer involving languages of different scripts performing suboptimally. To address this problem, we propose TransliCo, a framework that optimizes the Transliteration Contrastive Modeling (TCM) objective to fine-tune an mPLM by contrasting sentences in its training data and their transliterations in a unified script (in our case Latin), which enhances uniformity in the representation space for different scripts. Using Glot500-m, an mPLM pretrained on over 500 languages, as our source model, we fine-tune it on a small portion (5%) of its training data, and refer to the resulting model as Furina. We show that Furina not only better aligns representations from distinct scripts but also outperforms the original Glot500-m on various zero-shot crosslingual transfer tasks. Additionally, we achieve consistent improvement in a case study on the Indic group where the languages exhibit areal features but use different scripts. We make our code and models publicly available.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently garnered significant attention, primarily for their capabilities in text-based interactions. However, natural human interaction often relies on speech, necessitating a shift towards voice-based models. A straightforward approach to achieve this involves a pipeline of ``Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) + LLM + Text-to-Speech (TTS)", where input speech is transcribed to text, processed by an LLM, and then converted back to speech. Despite being straightforward, this method suffers from inherent limitations, such as information loss during modality conversion and error accumulation across the three stages. To address these issues, Speech Language Models (SpeechLMs) -- end-to-end models that generate speech without converting from text -- have emerged as a promising alternative. This survey paper provides the first comprehensive overview of recent methodologies for constructing SpeechLMs, detailing the key components of their architecture and the various training recipes integral to their development. Additionally, we systematically survey the various capabilities of SpeechLMs, categorize the evaluation metrics for SpeechLMs, and discuss the challenges and future research directions in this rapidly evolving field.

Recent breakthroughs in large language modeling have facilitated rigorous exploration of their application in diverse tasks related to tabular data modeling, such as prediction, tabular data synthesis, question answering, and table understanding. Each task presents unique challenges and opportunities. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive review that summarizes and compares the key techniques, metrics, datasets, models, and optimization approaches in this research domain. This survey aims to address this gap by consolidating recent progress in these areas, offering a thorough survey and taxonomy of the datasets, metrics, and methodologies utilized. It identifies strengths, limitations, unexplored territories, and gaps in the existing literature, while providing some insights for future research directions in this vital and rapidly evolving field. It also provides relevant code and datasets references. Through this comprehensive review, we hope to provide interested readers with pertinent references and insightful perspectives, empowering them with the necessary tools and knowledge to effectively navigate and address the prevailing challenges in the field.

Despite the rapid expansion of types of large language models, there remains a notable gap in models specifically designed for the Dutch language. This gap is not only a shortage in terms of pretrained Dutch models but also in terms of data, and benchmarks and leaderboards. This work provides a small step to improve the situation. First, we introduce two fine-tuned variants of the Llama 2 13B model. We first fine-tuned Llama 2 using Dutch-specific web-crawled data and subsequently refined this model further on multiple synthetic instruction and chat datasets. These datasets as well as the model weights are made available. In addition, we provide a leaderboard to keep track of the performance of (Dutch) models on a number of generation tasks, and we include results of a number of state-of-the-art models, including our own. Finally we provide a critical conclusion on what we believe is needed to push forward Dutch language models and the whole eco-system around the models.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed more widely, customization with respect to vocabulary, style and character becomes more important. In this work we introduce model arithmetic, a novel inference framework for composing and biasing LLMs without the need for model (re)training or highly specific datasets. In addition, the framework allows for more precise control of generated text than direct prompting and prior controlled text generation (CTG) techniques. Using model arithmetic, we can express prior CTG techniques as simple formulas and naturally extend them to new and more effective formulations. Further, we show that speculative sampling, a technique for efficient LLM sampling, extends to our setting. This enables highly efficient text generation with multiple composed models with only marginal overhead over a single model. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that model arithmetic allows fine-grained control of generated text while outperforming state-of-the-art on the task of toxicity reduction.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including language understanding, reasoning, and generation. However, general-domain LLMs often struggle with financial tasks due to the technical and specialized nature of financial texts. This study investigates the efficacy of instruction fine-tuning smaller-scale LLMs, including Mistral-7B, Llama3-8B, and Phi3-mini, to enhance their performance in financial text classification tasks. We fine-tuned both instruction-tuned and base models across four financial classification tasks, achieving significant improvements in task-specific performance. Furthermore, we evaluated the zero-shot capabilities of these fine-tuned models on three unseen complex financial tasks, including argument classification, deal completeness classification, and causal classification. Our results indicate while base model fine-tuning led to greater degradation, instruction-tuned models maintained more robust performance. To address this degradation, we employed model merging techniques, integrating single-task domain-specific fine-tuned models with the base model. Using this merging method resulted in significant enhancements in zero-shot performance, even exceeding the original model's accuracy on certain datasets. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of instruction fine-tuning and model merging for adapting LLMs to specialized financial text classification tasks.

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates remarkable multilingual capabilities in natural language processing, attracting global attention in both academia and industry. To mitigate potential discrimination and enhance the overall usability and accessibility for diverse language user groups, it is important for the development of language-fair technology. Despite the breakthroughs of LLMs, the investigation into the multilingual scenario remains insufficient, where a comprehensive survey to summarize recent approaches, developments, limitations, and potential solutions is desirable. To this end, we provide a survey with multiple perspectives on the utilization of LLMs in the multilingual scenario. We first rethink the transitions between previous and current research on pre-trained language models. Then we introduce several perspectives on the multilingualism of LLMs, including training and inference methods, model security, multi-domain with language culture, and usage of datasets. We also discuss the major challenges that arise in these aspects, along with possible solutions. Besides, we highlight future research directions that aim at further enhancing LLMs with multilingualism. The survey aims to help the research community address multilingual problems and provide a comprehensive understanding of the core concepts, key techniques, and latest developments in multilingual natural language processing based on LLMs.