CLHA: A Simple yet Effective Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a crucial technique in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, ensuring these LLMs behave in beneficial and comprehensible ways to users. However, a longstanding challenge in human alignment techniques based on reinforcement learning lies in their inherent complexity and difficulty in training. To address this challenge, we present a simple yet effective Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment (CLHA) to align LLMs with human preferences directly. CLHA employs a novel rescoring strategy to evaluate the noise within the data by considering its inherent quality and dynamically adjusting the training process. Simultaneously, CLHA utilizes pairwise contrastive loss and adaptive supervised fine-tuning loss to adaptively modify the likelihood of generating responses, ensuring enhanced alignment with human preferences. Using advanced methods, CLHA surpasses other algorithms, showcasing superior performance in terms of reward model scores, automatic evaluations, and human assessments on the widely used ``Helpful and Harmless'' dataset.

MoZIP: A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Large Language Models in Intellectual Property

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, there is limited understanding of how well LLMs perform in specific domains (e.g, the intellectual property (IP) domain). In this paper, we contribute a new benchmark, the first Multilingual-oriented quiZ on Intellectual Property (MoZIP), for the evaluation of LLMs in the IP domain. The MoZIP benchmark includes three challenging tasks: IP multiple-choice quiz (IPQuiz), IP question answering (IPQA), and patent matching (PatentMatch). In addition, we also develop a new IP-oriented multilingual large language model (called MoZi), which is a BLOOMZ-based model that has been supervised fine-tuned with multilingual IP-related text data. We evaluate our proposed MoZi model and four well-known LLMs (i.e., BLOOMZ, BELLE, ChatGLM and ChatGPT) on the MoZIP benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that MoZi outperforms BLOOMZ, BELLE and ChatGLM by a noticeable margin, while it had lower scores compared with ChatGPT. Notably, the performance of current LLMs on the MoZIP benchmark has much room for improvement, and even the most powerful ChatGPT does not reach the passing level. Our source code, data, and models are available at \url{https://github.com/AI-for-Science/MoZi}.

Layer-wise Regularized Dropout for Neural Language Models

Among the various pre-trained neural language models that are popular today, dropout is already an indispensable regularization technique. To solve the inconsistency between training and inference caused by the randomness of dropout, some studies use consistency training to regularize dropout at the output layer. In this paper, we propose a novel Layer-wise Regularized Dropout (LR-Drop), which is specially designed for Transformer-based Language models. Specifically, LR-Drop layer-wise regularizes each Transformer layer using the consistency training strategy. Each training sample passes through the two siamese sub-models sampled by dropout, and then LR-Drop forces the hidden states, multi-head attention matrices, and output distribution of the two siamese sub-models to be consistent. The proposed LR-Drop can be regarded as a "self-distillation" framework, in which each sub-model generated by dropout is the other's "teacher" model and "student" model. Through extensive experiments on 8 natural language understanding datasets, 6 neural machine translation datasets, and 1 abstractive summarization dataset (a total of 15 datasets), we show that LR-Drop achieves superior performances, including state-of-the-art results.

History, Development, and Principles of Large Language Models-An Introductory Survey

Language models serve as a cornerstone in natural language processing (NLP), utilizing mathematical methods to generalize language laws and knowledge for prediction and generation. Over extensive research spanning decades, language modeling has progressed from initial statistical language models (SLMs) to the contemporary landscape of large language models (LLMs). Notably, the swift evolution of LLMs has reached the ability to process, understand, and generate human-level text. Nevertheless, despite the significant advantages that LLMs offer in improving both work and personal lives, the limited understanding among general practitioners about the background and principles of these models hampers their full potential. Notably, most LLMs reviews focus on specific aspects and utilize specialized language, posing a challenge for practitioners lacking relevant background knowledge. In light of this, this survey aims to present a comprehensible overview of LLMs to assist a broader audience. It strives to facilitate a comprehensive understanding by exploring the historical background of language models and tracing their evolution over time. The survey further investigates the factors influencing the development of LLMs, emphasizing key contributions. Additionally, it concentrates on elucidating the underlying principles of LLMs, equipping audiences with essential theoretical knowledge. The survey also highlights the limitations of existing work and points out promising future directions.

E-EVAL: A Comprehensive Chinese K-12 Education Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

With the accelerating development of Large Language Models (LLMs), many LLMs are beginning to be used in the Chinese K-12 education domain. The integration of LLMs and education is getting closer and closer, however, there is currently no benchmark for evaluating LLMs that focuses on the Chinese K-12 education domain. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive natural language processing benchmark to accurately assess the capabilities of various LLMs in the Chinese K-12 education domain. To address this, we introduce the E-EVAL, the first comprehensive evaluation benchmark specifically designed for the Chinese K-12 education field. The E-EVAL consists of 4,351 multiple-choice questions at the primary, middle, and high school levels across a wide range of subjects, including Chinese, English, Politics, History, Ethics, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Geography. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of E-EVAL on advanced LLMs, including both English-dominant and Chinese-dominant models. Findings show that Chinese-dominant models perform well compared to English-dominant models, with many scoring even above the GPT 4.0. However, almost all models perform poorly in complex subjects such as mathematics. We also found that most Chinese-dominant LLMs did not achieve higher scores at the primary school level compared to the middle school level. We observe that the mastery of higher-order knowledge by the model does not necessarily imply the mastery of lower-order knowledge as well. Additionally, the experimental results indicate that the Chain of Thought (CoT) technique is effective only for the challenging science subjects, while Few-shot prompting is more beneficial for liberal arts subjects. With E-EVAL, we aim to analyze the strengths and limitations of LLMs in educational applications, and to contribute to the progress and development of Chinese K-12 education and LLMs.

Forgetting before Learning: Utilizing Parametric Arithmetic for Knowledge Updating in Large Language Models

Recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their amazing text understanding and generation capabilities. However, even stronger LLMs may still learn incorrect knowledge from the training corpus, as well as some knowledge that is outdated over time. Direct secondary fine-tuning with data containing new knowledge may be ineffective in updating knowledge due to the conflict between old and new knowledge. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for fine-tuning called F-Learning (Forgetting before Learning), which is based on parametric arithmetic to achieve forgetting of old knowledge and learning of new knowledge. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed F-Learning can obviously improve the knowledge updating performance of both full fine-tuning and LoRA fine-tuning. Moreover, we have also discovered that forgetting old knowledge by subtracting the parameters of LoRA can achieve a similar effect to subtracting the parameters of full fine-tuning, and sometimes even surpass it significantly.

Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck for Math Word Problems

Math Word Problems (MWP) aims to automatically solve mathematical questions given in texts. Previous studies tend to design complex models to capture additional information in the original text so as to enable the model to gain more comprehensive features. In this paper, we turn our attention in the opposite direction, and work on how to discard redundant features containing spurious correlations for MWP. To this end, we design an Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck method for MWP (called ESIB) based on variational information bottleneck, which extracts essential features of expression syntax tree while filtering latent-specific redundancy containing syntax-irrelevant features. The key idea of ESIB is to encourage multiple models to predict the same expression syntax tree for different problem representations of the same problem by mutual learning so as to capture consistent information of expression syntax tree and discard latent-specific redundancy. To improve the generalization ability of the model and generate more diverse expressions, we design a self-distillation loss to encourage the model to rely more on the expression syntax information in the latent space. Experimental results on two large-scale benchmarks show that our model not only achieves state-of-the-art results but also generates more diverse solutions. The code is available.

DQ-LoRe: Dual Queries with Low Rank Approximation Re-ranking for In-Context Learning

Recent advances in natural language processing, primarily propelled by Large Language Models (LLMs), have showcased their remarkable capabilities grounded in in-context learning. A promising avenue for guiding LLMs in intricate reasoning tasks involves the utilization of intermediate reasoning steps within the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm. Nevertheless, the central challenge lies in the effective selection of exemplars for facilitating in-context learning. In this study, we introduce a framework that leverages Dual Queries and Low-rank approximation Re-ranking (DQ-LoRe) to automatically select exemplars for in-context learning. Dual Queries first query LLM to obtain LLM-generated knowledge such as CoT, then query the retriever to obtain the final exemplars via both question and the knowledge. Moreover, for the second query, LoRe employs dimensionality reduction techniques to refine exemplar selection, ensuring close alignment with the input question's knowledge. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DQ-LoRe significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in the automatic selection of exemplars for GPT-4, enhancing performance from 92.5% to 94.2%. Our comprehensive analysis further reveals that DQ-LoRe consistently outperforms retrieval-based approaches in terms of both performance and adaptability, especially in scenarios characterized by distribution shifts. DQ-LoRe pushes the boundaries of in-context learning and opens up new avenues for addressing complex reasoning challenges. We will release the code soon.

Self-Distillation with Meta Learning for Knowledge Graph Completion

In this paper, we propose a selfdistillation framework with meta learning(MetaSD) for knowledge graph completion with dynamic pruning, which aims to learn compressed graph embeddings and tackle the longtail samples. Specifically, we first propose a dynamic pruning technique to obtain a small pruned model from a large source model, where the pruning mask of the pruned model could be updated adaptively per epoch after the model weights are updated. The pruned model is supposed to be more sensitive to difficult to memorize samples(e.g., longtail samples) than the source model. Then, we propose a onestep meta selfdistillation method for distilling comprehensive knowledge from the source model to the pruned model, where the two models coevolve in a dynamic manner during training. In particular, we exploit the performance of the pruned model, which is trained alongside the source model in one iteration, to improve the source models knowledge transfer ability for the next iteration via meta learning. Extensive experiments show that MetaSD achieves competitive performance compared to strong baselines, while being 10x smaller than baselines.