Re-Tuning: Overcoming the Compositionality Limits of Large Language Models with Recursive Tuning

We present a new method for large language models to solve compositional tasks. Although they have shown strong performance on traditional language understanding tasks, large language models struggle to solve compositional tasks, where the solution depends on solving smaller instances of the same problem. We propose a natural approach to solve compositional tasks recursively. Our method, Re-Tuning, tunes models to break down a problem into subproblems, solve those subproblems, and combine the results. We show that our method significantly improves model performance on three representative compositional tasks: integer addition, dynamic programming, and parity. Compared to state-of-the-art methods that keep intermediate steps towards solving the problems, Re-Tuning achieves significantly higher accuracy and is more GPU memory efficient.

RuleR: Improving LLM Controllability by Rule-based Data Recycling

Large language models (LLMs) still lack delicate controllability over their responses, which is critical to enhancing their performance and the user experience. However, curating supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets to improve LLM controllability usually relies on human experts or proprietary LLMs, which requires additional costs. To bridge this gap, we propose Rule-based Data Recycling (RuleR), a data augmentation method incorporating multiple constraints into the original data samples according to predefined rules, which creates new training tasks to consolidate the controllability of LLMs. Instead of creating new data from scratch, RuleR ``recycles'' existing data by simply applying rule-based edits to their responses and appending the rule-instructions in their original instructions. Experimental results demonstrate RuleR's effectiveness in improving LLM controllability while maintaining general instruction-following capabilities. The code will be released on https://github.com/MingLiiii/RuleR.

Mosaic IT: Enhancing Instruction Tuning with Data Mosaics

Finetuning large language models with a variety of instruction-response pairs has enhanced their capability to understand and follow instructions. Current instruction tuning primarily relies on teacher models or human intervention to generate and refine the instructions and responses, which are costly, non-sustainable, and may lack diversity. In this paper, we introduce Mosaic Instruction Tuning (Mosaic-IT), a human/model-free method that can efficiently create rich and diverse augmentations from existing instruction tuning data to enhance the finetuned LLM.Mosaic-IT randomly concatenates multiple instruction data into one and trains the model to produce the corresponding responses with predefined higher-level meta-instructions to strengthen its multi-step instruction-following and format-following skills. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate a superior performance and training efficiency of Mosaic-IT, which achieves consistent performance improvements over various benchmarks and an 80% reduction in training costs compared with original instruction tuning. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/tianyi-lab/Mosaic-IT.

A Flow-Based Model for Conditional and Probabilistic Electricity Consumption Profile Generation and Prediction

Residential Load Profile (RLP) generation and prediction are critical for the operation and planning of distribution networks, particularly as diverse low-carbon technologies are increasingly integrated. This paper introduces a novel flow-based generative model, termed Full Convolutional Profile Flow (FCPFlow), which is uniquely designed for both conditional and unconditional RLP generation, and for probabilistic load forecasting. By introducing two new layers--the invertible linear layer and the invertible normalization layer--the proposed FCPFlow architecture shows three main advantages compared to traditional statistical and contemporary deep generative models: 1) it is well-suited for RLP generation under continuous conditions, such as varying weather and annual electricity consumption, 2) it shows superior scalability in different datasets compared to traditional statistical models, and 3) it also demonstrates better modeling capabilities in capturing the complex correlation of RLPs compared with deep generative models.

Measuring Social Norms of Large Language Models

We present a new challenge to examine whether large language models understand social norms. In contrast to existing datasets, our dataset requires a fundamental understanding of social norms to solve. Our dataset features the largest set of social norm skills, consisting of 402 skills and 12,383 questions covering a wide set of social norms ranging from opinions and arguments to culture and laws. We design our dataset according to the K-12 curriculum. This enables the direct comparison of the social understanding of large language models to humans, more specifically, elementary students. While prior work generates nearly random accuracy on our benchmark, recent large language models such as GPT3.5-Turbo and LLaMA2-Chat are able to improve the performance significantly, only slightly below human performance. We then propose a multi-agent framework based on large language models to improve the models' ability to understand social norms. This method further improves large language models to be on par with humans. Given the increasing adoption of large language models in real-world applications, our finding is particularly important and presents a unique direction for future improvements.

RakutenAI-7B: Extending Large Language Models for Japanese

We introduce RakutenAI-7B, a suite of Japanese-oriented large language models that achieve the best performance on the Japanese LM Harness benchmarks among the open 7B models. Along with the foundation model, we release instruction- and chat-tuned models, RakutenAI-7B-instruct and RakutenAI-7B-chat respectively, under the Apache 2.0 license.

Benchmarking Zero-Shot Robustness of Multimodal Foundation Models: A Pilot Study

Pre-training image representations from the raw text about images enables zero-shot vision transfer to downstream tasks. Through pre-training on millions of samples collected from the internet, multimodal foundation models, such as CLIP, produce state-of-the-art zero-shot results that often reach competitiveness with fully supervised methods without the need for task-specific training. Besides the encouraging performance on classification accuracy, it is reported that these models close the robustness gap by matching the performance of supervised models trained on ImageNet under natural distribution shift. Because robustness is critical to real-world applications, especially safety-critical ones, in this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation based on a large-scale robustness benchmark covering 7 natural, 3 synthetic distribution shifts, and 11 adversarial attacks. We use CLIP as a pilot study. We show that CLIP leads to a significant robustness drop compared to supervised ImageNet models on our benchmark, especially under synthetic distribution shift and adversarial attacks. Furthermore, data overlap analysis suggests that the observed robustness under natural distribution shifts could be attributed, at least in part, to data overlap. In summary, our evaluation shows a comprehensive evaluation of robustness is necessary; and there is a significant need to improve the robustness of zero-shot multimodal models.

Measuring Vision-Language STEM Skills of Neural Models

We introduce a new challenge to test the STEM skills of neural models. The problems in the real world often require solutions, combining knowledge from STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Unlike existing datasets, our dataset requires the understanding of multimodal vision-language information of STEM. Our dataset features one of the largest and most comprehensive datasets for the challenge. It includes 448 skills and 1,073,146 questions spanning all STEM subjects. Compared to existing datasets that often focus on examining expert-level ability, our dataset includes fundamental skills and questions designed based on the K-12 curriculum. We also add state-of-the-art foundation models such as CLIP and GPT-3.5-Turbo to our benchmark. Results show that the recent model advances only help master a very limited number of lower grade-level skills (2.5% in the third grade) in our dataset. In fact, these models are still well below (averaging 54.7%) the performance of elementary students, not to mention near expert-level performance. To understand and increase the performance on our dataset, we teach the models on a training split of our dataset. Even though we observe improved performance, the model performance remains relatively low compared to average elementary students. To solve STEM problems, we will need novel algorithmic innovations from the community.

Towards Principled Task Grouping for Multi-Task Learning

This paper presents a novel approach to task grouping in Multitask Learning (MTL), advancing beyond existing methods by addressing key theoretical and practical limitations. Unlike prior studies, our approach offers a more theoretically grounded method that does not rely on restrictive assumptions for constructing transfer gains. We also propose a flexible mathematical programming formulation which can accommodate a wide spectrum of resource constraints, thus enhancing its versatility. Experimental results across diverse domains, including computer vision datasets, combinatorial optimization benchmarks and time series tasks, demonstrate the superiority of our method over extensive baselines, validating its effectiveness and general applicability in MTL.

Understanding Oversmoothing in Diffusion-Based GNNs From the Perspective of Operator Semigroup Theory

This paper presents a novel study of the oversmoothing issue in diffusion-based Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Diverging from extant approaches grounded in random walk analysis or particle systems, we approach this problem through operator semigroup theory. This theoretical framework allows us to rigorously prove that oversmoothing is intrinsically linked to the ergodicity of the diffusion operator. This finding further poses a general and mild ergodicity-breaking condition, encompassing the various specific solutions previously offered, thereby presenting a more universal and theoretically grounded approach to mitigating oversmoothing in diffusion-based GNNs. Additionally, we offer a probabilistic interpretation of our theory, forging a link with prior works and broadening the theoretical horizon. Our experimental results reveal that this ergodicity-breaking term effectively mitigates oversmoothing measured by Dirichlet energy, and simultaneously enhances performance in node classification tasks.