Language Modeling with Editable External Knowledge

When the world changes, so does the text that humans write about it. How do we build language models that can be easily updated to reflect these changes? One popular approach is retrieval-augmented generation, in which new documents are inserted into a knowledge base and retrieved during prediction for downstream tasks. Most prior work on these systems have focused on improving behavior during prediction through better retrieval or reasoning. This paper introduces ERASE, which instead improves model behavior when new documents are acquired, by incrementally deleting or rewriting other entries in the knowledge base each time a document is added. In two new benchmark datasets evaluating models' ability to answer questions about a stream of news articles or conversations, ERASE improves accuracy relative to conventional retrieval-augmented generation by 7-13% (Mixtral-8x7B) and 6-10% (Llama-3-8B) absolute. Code and data are available at https://github.com/belindal/ERASE

Bayesian Preference Elicitation with Language Models

Aligning AI systems to users' interests requires understanding and incorporating humans' complex values and preferences. Recently, language models (LMs) have been used to gather information about the preferences of human users. This preference data can be used to fine-tune or guide other LMs and/or AI systems. However, LMs have been shown to struggle with crucial aspects of preference learning: quantifying uncertainty, modeling human mental states, and asking informative questions. These challenges have been addressed in other areas of machine learning, such as Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design (BOED), which focus on designing informative queries within a well-defined feature space. But these methods, in turn, are difficult to scale and apply to real-world problems where simply identifying the relevant features can be difficult. We introduce OPEN (Optimal Preference Elicitation with Natural language) a framework that uses BOED to guide the choice of informative questions and an LM to extract features and translate abstract BOED queries into natural language questions. By combining the flexibility of LMs with the rigor of BOED, OPEN can optimize the informativity of queries while remaining adaptable to real-world domains. In user studies, we find that OPEN outperforms existing LM- and BOED-based methods for preference elicitation.

Learning with Language-Guided State Abstractions

We describe a framework for using natural language to design state abstractions for imitation learning. Generalizable policy learning in high-dimensional observation spaces is facilitated by well-designed state representations, which can surface important features of an environment and hide irrelevant ones. These state representations are typically manually specified, or derived from other labor-intensive labeling procedures. Our method, LGA (language-guided abstraction), uses a combination of natural language supervision and background knowledge from language models (LMs) to automatically build state representations tailored to unseen tasks. In LGA, a user first provides a (possibly incomplete) description of a target task in natural language; next, a pre-trained LM translates this task description into a state abstraction function that masks out irrelevant features; finally, an imitation policy is trained using a small number of demonstrations and LGA-generated abstract states. Experiments on simulated robotic tasks show that LGA yields state abstractions similar to those designed by humans, but in a fraction of the time, and that these abstractions improve generalization and robustness in the presence of spurious correlations and ambiguous specifications. We illustrate the utility of the learned abstractions on mobile manipulation tasks with a Spot robot.

Preference-Conditioned Language-Guided Abstraction

Learning from demonstrations is a common way for users to teach robots, but it is prone to spurious feature correlations. Recent work constructs state abstractions, i.e. visual representations containing task-relevant features, from language as a way to perform more generalizable learning. However, these abstractions also depend on a user's preference for what matters in a task, which may be hard to describe or infeasible to exhaustively specify using language alone. How do we construct abstractions to capture these latent preferences? We observe that how humans behave reveals how they see the world. Our key insight is that changes in human behavior inform us that there are differences in preferences for how humans see the world, i.e. their state abstractions. In this work, we propose using language models (LMs) to query for those preferences directly given knowledge that a change in behavior has occurred. In our framework, we use the LM in two ways: first, given a text description of the task and knowledge of behavioral change between states, we query the LM for possible hidden preferences; second, given the most likely preference, we query the LM to construct the state abstraction. In this framework, the LM is also able to ask the human directly when uncertain about its own estimate. We demonstrate our framework's ability to construct effective preference-conditioned abstractions in simulated experiments, a user study, as well as on a real Spot robot performing mobile manipulation tasks.

Eliciting Human Preferences with Language Models

Language models (LMs) can be directed to perform target tasks by using labeled examples or natural language prompts. But selecting examples or writing prompts for can be challenging--especially in tasks that involve unusual edge cases, demand precise articulation of nebulous preferences, or require an accurate mental model of LM behavior. We propose to use *LMs themselves* to guide the task specification process. In this paper, we introduce **Generative Active Task Elicitation (GATE)**: a learning framework in which models elicit and infer intended behavior through free-form, language-based interaction with users. We study GATE in three domains: email validation, content recommendation, and moral reasoning. In preregistered experiments, we show that LMs prompted to perform GATE (e.g., by generating open-ended questions or synthesizing informative edge cases) elicit responses that are often more informative than user-written prompts or labels. Users report that interactive task elicitation requires less effort than prompting or example labeling and surfaces novel considerations not initially anticipated by users. Our findings suggest that LM-driven elicitation can be a powerful tool for aligning models to complex human preferences and values.

Toward Interactive Dictation

Voice dictation is an increasingly important text input modality. Existing systems that allow both dictation and editing-by-voice restrict their command language to flat templates invoked by trigger words. In this work, we study the feasibility of allowing users to interrupt their dictation with spoken editing commands in open-ended natural language. We introduce a new task and dataset, TERTiUS, to experiment with such systems. To support this flexibility in real-time, a system must incrementally segment and classify spans of speech as either dictation or command, and interpret the spans that are commands. We experiment with using large pre-trained language models to predict the edited text, or alternatively, to predict a small text-editing program. Experiments show a natural trade-off between model accuracy and latency: a smaller model achieves 30% end-state accuracy with 1.3 seconds of latency, while a larger model achieves 55% end-state accuracy with 7 seconds of latency.

Measuring and Manipulating Knowledge Representations in Language Models

Neural language models (LMs) represent facts about the world described by text. Sometimes these facts derive from training data (in most LMs, a representation of the word banana encodes the fact that bananas are fruits). Sometimes facts derive from input text itself (a representation of the sentence "I poured out the bottle" encodes the fact that the bottle became empty). Tools for inspecting and modifying LM fact representations would be useful almost everywhere LMs are used: making it possible to update them when the world changes, to localize and remove sources of bias, and to identify errors in generated text. We describe REMEDI, an approach for querying and modifying factual knowledge in LMs. REMEDI learns a map from textual queries to fact encodings in an LM's internal representation system. These encodings can be used as knowledge editors: by adding them to LM hidden representations, we can modify downstream generation to be consistent with new facts. REMEDI encodings can also be used as model probes: by comparing them to LM representations, we can ascertain what properties LMs attribute to mentioned entities, and predict when they will generate outputs that conflict with background knowledge or input text. REMEDI thus links work on probing, prompting, and model editing, and offers steps toward general tools for fine-grained inspection and control of knowledge in LMs.

LaMPP: Language Models as Probabilistic Priors for Perception and Action

Language models trained on large text corpora encode rich distributional information about real-world environments and action sequences. This information plays a crucial role in current approaches to language processing tasks like question answering and instruction generation. We describe how to leverage language models for *non-linguistic* perception and control tasks. Our approach casts labeling and decision-making as inference in probabilistic graphical models in which language models parameterize prior distributions over labels, decisions and parameters, making it possible to integrate uncertain observations and incomplete background knowledge in a principled way. Applied to semantic segmentation, household navigation, and activity recognition tasks, this approach improves predictions on rare, out-of-distribution, and structurally novel inputs.

Language Modeling with Latent Situations

Language models (LMs) often generate incoherent outputs: they refer to events and entity states that are incompatible with the state of the world described in their inputs. We introduce SituationSupervision, a family of approaches for improving coherence in LMs by training them to construct and condition on explicit representations of entities and their states. SituationSupervision has two components: an auxiliary situation modeling task that trains models to predict state representations in context, and a latent state inference procedure that imputes these states from partially annotated training data. SituationSupervision can be applied to both fine-tuning (by supervising LMs to encode state variables in their hidden representations) and prompting (by inducing LMs to interleave textual descriptions of entity states with output text). In both cases, SituationSupervision requires only a small number of state annotations to produce major coherence improvements (between 4-11%), showing that standard LMs can be sample-efficiently trained to model not just language but the situations it describes.

Quantifying Adaptability in Pre-trained Language Models with 500 Tasks

When a neural language model (LM) is adapted to perform a new task, what aspects of the task predict the eventual performance of the model? In NLP, systematic features of LM generalization to individual examples are well characterized, but systematic aspects of LM adaptability to new tasks are not nearly as well understood. We present a large-scale empirical study of the features and limits of LM adaptability using a new benchmark, TaskBench500, built from 500 procedurally generated sequence modeling tasks. These tasks combine core aspects of language processing, including lexical semantics, sequence processing, memorization, logical reasoning, and world knowledge. Using TaskBench500, we evaluate three facets of adaptability, finding that: (1) adaptation procedures differ dramatically in their ability to memorize small datasets; (2) within a subset of task types, adaptation procedures exhibit compositional adaptability to complex tasks; and (3) failure to match training label distributions is explained by mismatches in the intrinsic difficulty of predicting individual labels. Our experiments show that adaptability to new tasks, like generalization to new examples, can be systematically described and understood, and we conclude with a discussion of additional aspects of adaptability that could be studied using the new benchmark.