Rewards-in-Context: Multi-objective Alignment of Foundation Models with Dynamic Preference Adjustment

We consider the problem of multi-objective alignment of foundation models with human preferences, which is a critical step towards helpful and harmless AI systems. However, it is generally costly and unstable to fine-tune large foundation models using reinforcement learning (RL), and the multi-dimensionality, heterogeneity, and conflicting nature of human preferences further complicate the alignment process. In this paper, we introduce Rewards-in-Context (RiC), which conditions the response of a foundation model on multiple rewards in its prompt context and applies supervised fine-tuning for alignment. The salient features of RiC are simplicity and adaptivity, as it only requires supervised fine-tuning of a single foundation model and supports dynamic adjustment for user preferences during inference time. Inspired by the analytical solution of an abstracted convex optimization problem, our dynamic inference-time adjustment method approaches the Pareto-optimal solution for multiple objectives. Empirical evidence demonstrates the efficacy of our method in aligning both Large Language Models (LLMs) and diffusion models to accommodate diverse rewards with only around 10% GPU hours compared with multi-objective RL baseline.

Fine-Grained Self-Endorsement Improves Factuality and Reasoning

This work studies improving large language model (LLM) generations at inference time by mitigating fact-conflicting hallucinations. Particularly, we propose a self-endorsement framework that leverages the fine-grained fact-level comparisons across multiple sampled responses. Compared with prior ensemble methods (Wang et al., 2022;Chen et al., 2023)) that perform response-level selection, our approach can better alleviate hallucinations, especially for longform generation tasks. Our approach can broadly benefit smaller and open-source LLMs as it mainly conducts simple content-based comparisons. Experiments on Biographies show that our method can effectively improve the factuality of generations with simple and intuitive prompts across different scales of LLMs. Besides, comprehensive analyses on TriviaQA and GSM8K demonstrate the potential of self-endorsement for broader application.

MatPlotAgent: Method and Evaluation for LLM-Based Agentic Scientific Data Visualization

Scientific data visualization plays a crucial role in research by enabling the direct display of complex information and assisting researchers in identifying implicit patterns. Despite its importance, the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for scientific data visualization remains rather unexplored. In this study, we introduce MatPlotAgent, an efficient model-agnostic LLM agent framework designed to automate scientific data visualization tasks. Leveraging the capabilities of both code LLMs and multi-modal LLMs, MatPlotAgent consists of three core modules: query understanding, code generation with iterative debugging, and a visual feedback mechanism for error correction. To address the lack of benchmarks in this field, we present MatPlotBench, a high-quality benchmark consisting of 100 human-verified test cases. Additionally, we introduce a scoring approach that utilizes GPT-4V for automatic evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that MatPlotAgent can improve the performance of various LLMs, including both commercial and open-source models. Furthermore, the proposed evaluation method shows a strong correlation with human-annotated scores.

SportsMetrics: Blending Text and Numerical Data to Understand Information Fusion in LLMs

Large language models hold significant potential for integrating various data types, such as text documents and database records, for advanced analytics. However, blending text and numerical data presents substantial challenges. LLMs need to process and cross-reference entities and numbers, handle data inconsistencies and redundancies, and develop planning capabilities such as building a working memory for managing complex data queries. In this paper, we introduce four novel tasks centered around sports data analytics to evaluate the numerical reasoning and information fusion capabilities of LLMs. These tasks involve providing LLMs with detailed, play-by-play sports game descriptions, then challenging them with adversarial scenarios such as new game rules, longer durations, scrambled narratives, and analyzing key statistics in game summaries. We conduct extensive experiments on NBA and NFL games to assess the performance of LLMs on these tasks. Our benchmark, SportsMetrics, introduces a new mechanism for assessing LLMs' numerical reasoning and fusion skills.

SPECTRUM: Speaker-Enhanced Pre-Training for Long Dialogue Summarization

Multi-turn dialogues are characterized by their extended length and the presence of turn-taking conversations. Traditional language models often overlook the distinct features of these dialogues by treating them as regular text. In this paper, we propose a speaker-enhanced pre-training method for long dialogue summarization, which leverages the inherent structure of multiple-turn dialogues. To support our study, we curate a diverse dataset that includes transcripts from real-world scenarios, movie or TV show transcripts, and dialogues generated by a Large Language Model. We then perform a pre-training, which encompasses the detection of speaker changes, and masked utterance generation. Experimental results of fine-tuned models demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on downstream benchmarks with long context, surpassing baseline models and highlighting the effectiveness of our approach. Our findings highlight the importance of curating pre-training datasets that exhibit diversity and variations in length distribution to ensure effective alignment with downstream datasets.

WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) leads to a new era marked by the development of autonomous applications in the real world, which drives innovation in the creation of advanced web-based agents. Existing web agents typically only handle one input modality and are evaluated only in simplified web simulators or static web snapshots, greatly limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce WebVoyager, an innovative Large Multimodal Model (LMM) powered web agent that can complete user instructions end-to-end by interacting with real-world websites. Moreover, we propose a new evaluation protocol for web agents to address the challenges of automatic evaluation of open-ended web agent tasks, leveraging the robust multimodal comprehension capabilities of GPT-4V. We create a new benchmark by gathering real-world tasks from 15 widely used websites to evaluate our agents. We show that WebVoyager achieves a 55.7% task success rate, significantly surpassing the performance of both GPT-4 (All Tools) and the WebVoyager (text-only) setups, underscoring the exceptional capability of WebVoyager in practical applications. We found that our proposed automatic evaluation achieves 85.3% agreement with human judgment, paving the way for further development of web agents in a real-world setting.

MM-LLMs: Recent Advances in MultiModal Large Language Models

In the past year, MultiModal Large Language Models (MM-LLMs) have undergone substantial advancements, augmenting off-the-shelf LLMs to support MM inputs or outputs via cost-effective training strategies. The resulting models not only preserve the inherent reasoning and decision-making capabilities of LLMs but also empower a diverse range of MM tasks. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey aimed at facilitating further research of MM-LLMs. Specifically, we first outline general design formulations for model architecture and training pipeline. Subsequently, we provide brief introductions of $26$ existing MM-LLMs, each characterized by its specific formulations. Additionally, we review the performance of MM-LLMs on mainstream benchmarks and summarize key training recipes to enhance the potency of MM-LLMs. Lastly, we explore promising directions for MM-LLMs while concurrently maintaining a real-time tracking website for the latest developments in the field. We hope that this survey contributes to the ongoing advancement of the MM-LLMs domain.

Inconsistent dialogue responses and how to recover from them

One critical issue for chat systems is to stay consistent about preferences, opinions, beliefs and facts of itself, which has been shown a difficult problem. In this work, we study methods to assess and bolster utterance consistency of chat systems. A dataset is first developed for studying the inconsistencies, where inconsistent dialogue responses, explanations of the inconsistencies, and recovery utterances are authored by annotators. This covers the life span of inconsistencies, namely introduction, understanding, and resolution. Building on this, we introduce a set of tasks centered on dialogue consistency, specifically focused on its detection and resolution. Our experimental findings indicate that our dataset significantly helps the progress in identifying and resolving conversational inconsistencies, and current popular large language models like ChatGPT which are good at resolving inconsistencies however still struggle with detection.

InFoBench: Evaluating Instruction Following Ability in Large Language Models

This paper introduces the Decomposed Requirements Following Ratio (DRFR), a new metric for evaluating Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to follow instructions. Addressing a gap in current methodologies, DRFR breaks down complex instructions into simpler criteria, facilitating a detailed analysis of LLMs' compliance with various aspects of tasks. Alongside this metric, we present InFoBench, a benchmark comprising 500 diverse instructions and 2,250 decomposed questions across multiple constraint categories. Our experiments compare DRFR with traditional scoring methods and explore annotation sources, including human experts, crowd-sourced workers, and GPT-4. The findings demonstrate DRFR's higher reliability and the effectiveness of using GPT-4 as a cost-efficient annotator. The evaluation of several advanced LLMs using this framework reveals their strengths and areas needing improvement, particularly in complex instruction-following. This study contributes a novel metric and benchmark, offering insights for future LLM development and evaluation.

Zebra: Extending Context Window with Layerwise Grouped Local-Global Attention

This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in processing and understanding extensive text sequences, a critical aspect in applications requiring deep comprehension and synthesis of large volumes of information. Recognizing the inherent challenges in extending the context window for LLMs, primarily built on Transformer architecture, we propose a new model architecture, referred to as Zebra. This architecture efficiently manages the quadratic time and memory complexity issues associated with full attention in the Transformer by employing grouped local-global attention layers. Our model, akin to a zebra's alternating stripes, balances local and global attention layers, significantly reducing computational requirements and memory consumption. Comprehensive experiments, including pretraining from scratch, continuation of long context adaptation training, and long instruction tuning, are conducted to evaluate the Zebra's performance. The results show that Zebra achieves comparable or superior performance on both short and long sequence benchmarks, while also enhancing training and inference efficiency.