Stabilizing RLHF through Advantage Model and Selective Rehearsal

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet aligning these models with human values and preferences using RLHF remains a significant challenge. This challenge is characterized by various instabilities, such as reward hacking and catastrophic forgetting. In this technical report, we propose two innovations to stabilize RLHF training: 1) Advantage Model, which directly models advantage score i.e., extra reward compared to the expected rewards and regulates score distributions across tasks to prevent reward hacking. 2) Selective Rehearsal, which mitigates catastrophic forgetting by strategically selecting data for PPO training and knowledge rehearsing. Our experimental analysis on public and proprietary datasets reveals that the proposed methods not only increase stability in RLHF training but also achieve higher reward scores and win rates.

Do you really follow me? Adversarial Instructions for Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in following instructions, making them valuable in customer-facing applications. However, their impressive capabilities also raise concerns about the amplification of risks posed by adversarial instructions, which can be injected into the model input by third-party attackers to manipulate LLMs' original instructions and prompt unintended actions and content. Therefore, it is crucial to understand LLMs' ability to accurately discern which instructions to follow to ensure their safe deployment in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a pioneering benchmark for automatically evaluating the robustness of LLMs against adversarial instructions. The objective of this benchmark is to quantify the extent to which LLMs are influenced by injected adversarial instructions and assess their ability to differentiate between these adversarial instructions and original user instructions. Through experiments conducted with state-of-the-art instruction-following LLMs, we uncover significant limitations in their robustness against adversarial instruction attacks. Furthermore, our findings indicate that prevalent instruction-tuned models are prone to being overfitted to follow any instruction phrase in the prompt without truly understanding which instructions should be followed. This highlights the need to address the challenge of training models to comprehend prompts instead of merely following instruction phrases and completing the text.

Self-Checker: Plug-and-Play Modules for Fact-Checking with Large Language Models

Fact-checking is an essential task in NLP that is commonly utilized for validating the factual accuracy of claims. Prior work has mainly focused on fine-tuning pre-trained languages models on specific datasets, which can be computationally intensive and time-consuming. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-3, researchers are now exploring their in-context learning capabilities for a wide range of tasks. In this paper, we aim to assess the capacity of LLMs for fact-checking by introducing Self-Checker, a framework comprising a set of plug-and-play modules that facilitate fact-checking by purely prompting LLMs in an almost zero-shot setting. This framework provides a fast and efficient way to construct fact-checking systems in low-resource environments. Empirical results demonstrate the potential of Self-Checker in utilizing LLMs for fact-checking. However, there is still significant room for improvement compared to SOTA fine-tuned models, which suggests that LLM adoption could be a promising approach for future fact-checking research.

SGP-TOD: Building Task Bots Effortlessly via Schema-Guided LLM Prompting

Building end-to-end task bots and maintaining their integration with new functionalities using minimal human efforts is a long-standing challenge in dialog research. Recently large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in conversational engagement and adherence to instructions across various downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce SGP-TOD, Schema-Guided Prompting for building Task-Oriented Dialog systems effortlessly based on LLMs. Utilizing the symbolic knowledge -- task schema, we instruct fixed LLMs to generate appropriate responses on novel tasks, circumventing the need for training data. Specifically, SGP-TOD comprises three components: a LLM for engaging with users, a DST Prompter to aid the LLM with dialog state tracking, which is then used to retrieve database items, and a Policy Prompter to elicit proper responses adhering to the provided dialog policy. Experimental results on Multiwoz, RADDLE and STAR datasets show that our training-free strategy SGP-TOD, without any task-specific data, yields state-of-the-art (SOTA) zero-shot performance, greatly surpasses the few-shot approaches. In a domain-extension setting, SGP-TOD aptly adapts to new functionalities by merely adding supplementary schema rules. We make our code and data publicly available.

ArK: Augmented Reality with Knowledge Interactive Emergent Ability

Despite the growing adoption of mixed reality and interactive AI agents, it remains challenging for these systems to generate high quality 2D/3D scenes in unseen environments. The common practice requires deploying an AI agent to collect large amounts of data for model training for every new task. This process is costly, or even impossible, for many domains. In this study, we develop an infinite agent that learns to transfer knowledge memory from general foundation models (e.g. GPT4, DALLE) to novel domains or scenarios for scene understanding and generation in the physical or virtual world. The heart of our approach is an emerging mechanism, dubbed Augmented Reality with Knowledge Inference Interaction (ArK), which leverages knowledge-memory to generate scenes in unseen physical world and virtual reality environments. The knowledge interactive emergent ability (Figure 1) is demonstrated as the observation learns i) micro-action of cross-modality: in multi-modality models to collect a large amount of relevant knowledge memory data for each interaction task (e.g., unseen scene understanding) from the physical reality; and ii) macro-behavior of reality-agnostic: in mix-reality environments to improve interactions that tailor to different characterized roles, target variables, collaborative information, and so on. We validate the effectiveness of ArK on the scene generation and editing tasks. We show that our ArK approach, combined with large foundation models, significantly improves the quality of generated 2D/3D scenes, compared to baselines, demonstrating the potential benefit of incorporating ArK in generative AI for applications such as metaverse and gaming simulation.

Chameleon: Plug-and-Play Compositional Reasoning with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in various natural language processing tasks with emergent abilities. However, they face inherent limitations, such as an inability to access up-to-date information, utilize external tools, or perform precise mathematical reasoning. In this paper, we introduce Chameleon, a plug-and-play compositional reasoning framework that augments LLMs to help address these challenges. Chameleon synthesizes programs to compose various tools, including LLM models, off-the-shelf vision models, web search engines, Python functions, and rule-based modules tailored to user interests. Built on top of an LLM as a natural language planner, Chameleon infers the appropriate sequence of tools to compose and execute in order to generate a final response. We showcase the adaptability and effectiveness of Chameleon on two tasks: ScienceQA and TabMWP. Notably, Chameleon with GPT-4 achieves an 86.54% accuracy on ScienceQA, significantly improving upon the best published few-shot model by 11.37%; using GPT-4 as the underlying LLM, Chameleon achieves a 17.8% increase over the state-of-the-art model, leading to a 98.78% overall accuracy on TabMWP. Further studies suggest that using GPT-4 as a planner exhibits more consistent and rational tool selection and is able to infer potential constraints given the instructions, compared to other LLMs like ChatGPT.

Instruction Tuning with GPT-4

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.

Interactive Text Generation

Users interact with text, image, code, or other editors on a daily basis. However, machine learning models are rarely trained in the settings that reflect the interactivity between users and their editor. This is understandable as training AI models with real users is not only slow and costly, but what these models learn may be specific to user interface design choices. Unfortunately, this means most of the research on text, code, and image generation has focused on non-interactive settings, whereby the model is expected to get everything right without accounting for any input from a user who may be willing to help. We introduce a new Interactive Text Generation task that allows training generation models interactively without the costs of involving real users, by using user simulators that provide edits that guide the model towards a given target text. We train our interactive models using Imitation Learning, and our experiments against competitive non-interactive generation models show that models trained interactively are superior to their non-interactive counterparts, even when all models are given the same budget of user inputs or edits.

Check Your Facts and Try Again: Improving Large Language Models with External Knowledge and Automated Feedback

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are able to generate human-like, fluent responses for many downstream tasks, e.g., task-oriented dialog and question answering. However, applying LLMs to real-world, mission-critical applications remains challenging mainly due to their tendency to generate hallucinations and their inability to use external knowledge. This paper proposes a LLM-Augmenter system, which augments a black-box LLM with a set of plug-and-play modules. Our system makes the LLM generate responses grounded in external knowledge, e.g., stored in task-specific databases. It also iteratively revises LLM prompts to improve model responses using feedback generated by utility functions, e.g., the factuality score of a LLM-generated response. The effectiveness of LLM-Augmenter is empirically validated on two types of scenarios, task-oriented dialog and open-domain question answering. LLM-Augmenter significantly reduces ChatGPT's hallucinations without sacrificing the fluency and informativeness of its responses. We make the source code and models publicly available.