Like Father, Like Son: Kinship-Aware Preference Mapping (KARMA) for Automatic Alignment in Large Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Language Model (LLM) alignment have sought to mitigate the cost of human annotations by leveraging pretrained models to generate preference data. However, existing methods often compare responses from models with substantially different capabilities, yielding superficial distinctions that fail to provide meaningful guidance on what constitutes a superior response. To address this limitation, we propose Kinship-Aware pReference MApping (KARMA), a novel framework that systematically pairs responses from models with comparable competencies. By constraining preference comparisons to outputs of similar complexity and quality, KARMA enhances the informativeness of preference data and improves the granularity of alignment signals. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our kinship-aware approach leads to more consistent and interpretable alignment outcomes, ultimately facilitating a more principled and reliable pathway for aligning LLM behavior with human preferences.

CoME: An Unlearning-based Approach to Conflict-free Model Editing

Large language models (LLMs) often retain outdated or incorrect information from pre-training, which undermines their reliability. While model editing methods have been developed to address such errors without full re-training, they frequently suffer from knowledge conflicts, where outdated information interferes with new knowledge. In this work, we propose Conflict-free Model Editing (CoME), a novel framework that enhances the accuracy of knowledge updates in LLMs by selectively removing outdated knowledge. CoME leverages unlearning to mitigate knowledge interference, allowing new information to be integrated without compromising relevant linguistic features. Through experiments on GPT-J and LLaMA-3 using Counterfact and ZsRE datasets, we demonstrate that CoME improves both editing accuracy and model reliability when applied to existing editing methods. Our results highlight that the targeted removal of outdated knowledge is crucial for enhancing model editing effectiveness and maintaining the model's generative performance.

LCIRC: A Recurrent Compression Approach for Efficient Long-form Context and Query Dependent Modeling in LLMs

While large language models (LLMs) excel in generating coherent and contextually rich outputs, their capacity to efficiently handle long-form contexts is limited by fixed-length position embeddings. Additionally, the computational cost of processing long sequences increases quadratically, making it challenging to extend context length. To address these challenges, we propose Long-form Context Injection with Recurrent Compression (LCIRC), a method that enables the efficient processing long-form sequences beyond the model's length limit through recurrent compression without retraining the entire model. We further introduce query dependent context modeling, which selectively compresses query-relevant information, ensuring that the model retains the most pertinent content. Our empirical results demonstrate that Query Dependent LCIRC (QD-LCIRC) significantly improves LLM's ability to manage extended contexts, making it well-suited for tasks that require both comprehensive context understanding and query relevance.

Find the Intention of Instruction: Comprehensive Evaluation of Instruction Understanding for Large Language Models

One of the key strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their ability to interact with humans by generating appropriate responses to given instructions. This ability, known as instruction-following capability, has established a foundation for the use of LLMs across various fields and serves as a crucial metric for evaluating their performance. While numerous evaluation benchmarks have been developed, most focus solely on clear and coherent instructions. However, we have noted that LLMs can become easily distracted by instruction-formatted statements, which may lead to an oversight of their instruction comprehension skills. To address this issue, we introduce the Intention of Instruction (IoInst) benchmark. This benchmark evaluates LLMs' capacity to remain focused and understand instructions without being misled by extraneous instructions. The primary objective of this benchmark is to identify the appropriate instruction that accurately guides the generation of a given context. Our findings suggest that even recently introduced state-of-the-art models still lack instruction understanding capability. Along with the proposition of IoInst in this study, we also present broad analyses of the several strategies potentially applicable to IoInst.

Exploring Coding Spot: Understanding Parametric Contributions to LLM Coding Performance

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable proficiency in both code generation and comprehension across multiple programming languages. However, the mechanisms underlying this proficiency remain underexplored, particularly with respect to whether distinct programming languages are processed independently or within a shared parametric region. Drawing an analogy to the specialized regions of the brain responsible for distinct cognitive functions, we introduce the concept of Coding Spot, a specialized parametric region within LLMs that facilitates coding capabilities. Our findings identify this Coding Spot and show that targeted modifications to this subset significantly affect performance on coding tasks, while largely preserving non-coding functionalities. This compartmentalization mirrors the functional specialization observed in cognitive neuroscience, where specific brain regions are dedicated to distinct tasks, suggesting that LLMs may similarly employ specialized parameter regions for different knowledge domains.

LP Data Pipeline: Lightweight, Purpose-driven Data Pipeline for Large Language Models

Creating high-quality, large-scale datasets for large language models (LLMs) often relies on resource-intensive, GPU-accelerated models for quality filtering, making the process time-consuming and costly. This dependence on GPUs limits accessibility for organizations lacking significant computational infrastructure. To address this issue, we introduce the Lightweight, Purpose-driven (LP) Data Pipeline, a framework that operates entirely on CPUs to streamline the processes of dataset extraction, filtering, and curation. Based on our four core principles, the LP Data Pipeline significantly reduces preparation time and cost while maintaining high data quality. Importantly, our pipeline enables the creation of purpose-driven datasets tailored to specific domains and languages, enhancing the applicability of LLMs in specialized contexts. We anticipate that our pipeline will lower the barriers to LLM development, enabling a wide range of organizations to access LLMs more easily.

Can Code-Switched Texts Activate a Knowledge Switch in LLMs? A Case Study on English-Korean Code-Switching

Code-switching (CS), a phenomenon where multilingual speakers alternate between languages in a discourse, can convey subtle cultural and linguistic nuances that can be otherwise lost in translation. Recent state-of-the-art multilingual large language models (LLMs) demonstrate excellent multilingual abilities in various aspects including understanding CS, but the power of CS in eliciting language-specific knowledge is yet to be discovered. Therefore, we investigate the effectiveness of code-switching on a wide range of multilingual LLMs in terms of knowledge activation, or the act of identifying and leveraging knowledge for reasoning. To facilitate the research, we first present EnKoQA, a synthetic English-Korean CS question-answering dataset. We provide a comprehensive analysis on a variety of multilingual LLMs by subdividing activation process into knowledge identification and knowledge leveraging. Our experiments demonstrate that compared to English text, CS can faithfully activate knowledge inside LLMs, especially on language-specific domains. In addition, the performance gap between CS and English is larger in models that show excellent monolingual abilities, suggesting that there exists a correlation with CS and Korean proficiency.

Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard2: Bridging Foundational and Practical Evaluation for Korean LLMs

The Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard has been instrumental in benchmarking Korean Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it has certain limitations. Notably, the disconnect between quantitative improvements on the overly academic leaderboard benchmarks and the qualitative impact of the models should be addressed. Furthermore, the benchmark suite is largely composed of translated versions of their English counterparts, which may not fully capture the intricacies of the Korean language. To address these issues, we propose Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard2, an improved version of the earlier Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard. The original benchmarks are entirely replaced with new tasks that are more closely aligned with real-world capabilities. Additionally, four new native Korean benchmarks are introduced to better reflect the distinct characteristics of the Korean language. Through these refinements, Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard2 seeks to provide a more meaningful evaluation for advancing Korean LLMs.

Representing the Under-Represented: Cultural and Core Capability Benchmarks for Developing Thai Large Language Models

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has highlighted the need for robust evaluation frameworks that assess their core capabilities, such as reasoning, knowledge, and commonsense, leading to the inception of certain widely-used benchmark suites such as the H6 benchmark. However, these benchmark suites are primarily built for the English language, and there exists a lack thereof for under-represented languages, in terms of LLM development, such as Thai. On the other hand, developing LLMs for Thai should also include enhancing the cultural understanding as well as core capabilities. To address these dual challenge in Thai LLM research, we propose two key benchmarks: Thai-H6 and Thai Cultural and Linguistic Intelligence Benchmark (ThaiCLI). Through a thorough evaluation of various LLMs with multi-lingual capabilities, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the proposed benchmarks and how they contribute to Thai LLM development. Furthermore, we will make both the datasets and evaluation code publicly available to encourage further research and development for Thai LLMs.

InstaTrans: An Instruction-Aware Translation Framework for Non-English Instruction Datasets

It is challenging to generate high-quality instruction datasets for non-English languages due to tail phenomena, which limit performance on less frequently observed data. To mitigate this issue, we propose translating existing high-quality English instruction datasets as a solution, emphasizing the need for complete and instruction-aware translations to maintain the inherent attributes of these datasets. We claim that fine-tuning LLMs with datasets translated in this way can improve their performance in the target language. To this end, we introduces a new translation framework tailored for instruction datasets, named InstaTrans (INSTruction-Aware TRANSlation). Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of InstaTrans over other competitors in terms of completeness and instruction-awareness of translation, highlighting its potential to broaden the accessibility of LLMs across diverse languages at a relatively low cost. Furthermore, we have validated that fine-tuning LLMs with datasets translated by InstaTrans can effectively improve their performance in the target language.