Multi-modal Auto-regressive Modeling via Visual Words

Large Language Models (LLMs), benefiting from the auto-regressive modelling approach performed on massive unannotated texts corpora, demonstrates powerful perceptual and reasoning capabilities. However, as for extending auto-regressive modelling to multi-modal scenarios to build Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs), there lies a great difficulty that the image information is processed in the LMM as continuous visual embeddings, which cannot obtain discrete supervised labels for classification. In this paper, we successfully perform multi-modal auto-regressive modeling with a unified objective for the first time. Specifically, we propose the concept of visual words, which maps the visual features to probability distributions over LLM's vocabulary, providing supervision information for visual modelling. We further explore the distribution of visual features in the semantic space within LMM and the possibility of using text embeddings to represent visual information. Experimental results and ablation studies on 5 VQA tasks and 4 benchmark toolkits validate the powerful performance of our proposed approach.

Hypertext Entity Extraction in Webpage

Webpage entity extraction is a fundamental natural language processing task in both research and applications. Nowadays, the majority of webpage entity extraction models are trained on structured datasets which strive to retain textual content and its structure information. However, existing datasets all overlook the rich hypertext features (e.g., font color, font size) which show their effectiveness in previous works. To this end, we first collect a \textbf{H}ypertext \textbf{E}ntity \textbf{E}xtraction \textbf{D}ataset (\textit{HEED}) from the e-commerce domains, scraping both the text and the corresponding explicit hypertext features with high-quality manual entity annotations. Furthermore, we present the \textbf{Mo}E-based \textbf{E}ntity \textbf{E}xtraction \textbf{F}ramework (\textit{MoEEF}), which efficiently integrates multiple features to enhance model performance by Mixture of Experts and outperforms strong baselines, including the state-of-the-art small-scale models and GPT-3.5-turbo. Moreover, the effectiveness of hypertext features in \textit{HEED} and several model components in \textit{MoEEF} are analyzed.

Unveiling Vulnerability of Self-Attention

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are shown to be vulnerable to minor word changes, which poses a big threat to real-world systems. While previous studies directly focus on manipulating word inputs, they are limited by their means of generating adversarial samples, lacking generalization to versatile real-world attack. This paper studies the basic structure of transformer-based PLMs, the self-attention (SA) mechanism. (1) We propose a powerful perturbation technique \textit{HackAttend}, which perturbs the attention scores within the SA matrices via meticulously crafted attention masks. We show that state-of-the-art PLMs fall into heavy vulnerability that minor attention perturbations $(1\%)$ can produce a very high attack success rate $(98\%)$. Our paper expands the conventional text attack of word perturbations to more general structural perturbations. (2) We introduce \textit{S-Attend}, a novel smoothing technique that effectively makes SA robust via structural perturbations. We empirically demonstrate that this simple yet effective technique achieves robust performance on par with adversarial training when facing various text attackers. Code is publicly available at \url{github.com/liongkj/HackAttend}.

Head-wise Shareable Attention for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from huge number of parameters, which restricts their deployment on edge devices. Weight sharing is one promising solution that encourages weight reuse, effectively reducing memory usage with less performance drop. However, current weight sharing techniques primarily focus on small-scale models like BERT and employ coarse-grained sharing rules, e.g., layer-wise. This becomes limiting given the prevalence of LLMs and sharing an entire layer or block obviously diminishes the flexibility of weight sharing. In this paper, we present a perspective on $\textit{$\textbf{head-wise shareable attention for large language models}$}$. We further propose two memory-efficient methods that share parameters across attention heads, with a specific focus on LLMs. Both of them use the same dynamic strategy to select the shared weight matrices. The first method directly reuses the pre-trained weights without retraining, denoted as $\textbf{DirectShare}$. The second method first post-trains with constraint on weight matrix similarity and then shares, denoted as $\textbf{PostShare}$. Experimental results reveal our head-wise shared models still maintain satisfactory capabilities, demonstrating the feasibility of fine-grained weight sharing applied to LLMs.

Comprehensive Cognitive LLM Agent for Smartphone GUI Automation

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential as human-like autonomous language agents to interact with real-world environments, especially for graphical user interface (GUI) automation. However, those GUI agents require comprehensive cognition ability including exhaustive perception and reliable action response. We propose \underline{Co}mprehensive \underline{Co}gnitive LLM \underline{Agent}, CoCo-Agent, with two novel approaches, comprehensive environment perception (CEP) and conditional action prediction (CAP), to systematically improve the GUI automation performance. First, CEP facilitates the GUI perception through different aspects and granularity, including screenshots and complementary detailed layouts for the visual channel and historical actions for the textual channel. Second, CAP decomposes the action prediction into sub-problems: action type prediction and action target conditioned on the action type. With our technical design, our agent achieves new state-of-the-art performance on AITW and META-GUI benchmarks, showing promising abilities in realistic scenarios.

LaCo: Large Language Model Pruning via Layer Collapse

Large language models (LLMs) based on transformer are witnessing a notable trend of size expansion, which brings considerable costs to both model training and inference. However, existing methods such as model quantization, knowledge distillation, and model pruning are constrained by various issues, including hardware support limitations, the need for extensive training, and alterations to the internal structure of the model. In this paper, we propose a concise layer-wise pruning method called \textit{Layer Collapse (LaCo)}, in which rear model layers collapse into a prior layer, enabling a rapid reduction in model size while preserving the model structure. Comprehensive experiments show that our method maintains an average task performance of over 80\% at pruning ratios of 25-30\%, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art structured pruning methods. We also conduct post-training experiments to confirm that the proposed pruning method effectively inherits the parameters of the original model. Finally, we discuss our motivation from the perspective of layer-wise similarity and evaluate the performance of the pruned LLMs across various pruning ratios.

Dissecting Human and LLM Preferences

As a relative quality comparison of model responses, human and Large Language Model (LLM) preferences serve as common alignment goals in model fine-tuning and criteria in evaluation. Yet, these preferences merely reflect broad tendencies, resulting in less explainable and controllable models with potential safety risks. In this work, we dissect the preferences of human and 32 different LLMs to understand their quantitative composition, using annotations from real-world user-model conversations for a fine-grained, scenario-wise analysis. We find that humans are less sensitive to errors, favor responses that support their stances, and show clear dislike when models admit their limits. On the contrary, advanced LLMs like GPT-4-Turbo emphasize correctness, clarity, and harmlessness more. Additionally, LLMs of similar sizes tend to exhibit similar preferences, regardless of their training methods, and fine-tuning for alignment does not significantly alter the preferences of pretrained-only LLMs. Finally, we show that preference-based evaluation can be intentionally manipulated. In both training-free and training-based settings, aligning a model with the preferences of judges boosts scores, while injecting the least preferred properties lowers them. This results in notable score shifts: up to 0.59 on MT-Bench (1-10 scale) and 31.94 on AlpacaEval 2.0 (0-100 scale), highlighting the significant impact of this strategic adaptation. Interactive Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/GAIR/Preference-Dissection-Visualization Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/GAIR/preference-dissection Code: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/Preference-Dissection

Is it Possible to Edit Large Language Models Robustly?

Large language models (LLMs) have played a pivotal role in building communicative AI to imitate human behaviors but face the challenge of efficient customization. To tackle this challenge, recent studies have delved into the realm of model editing, which manipulates specific memories of language models and changes the related language generation. However, the robustness of model editing remains an open question. This work seeks to understand the strengths and limitations of editing methods, thus facilitating robust, realistic applications of communicative AI. Concretely, we conduct extensive analysis to address the three key research questions. Q1: Can edited LLMs behave consistently resembling communicative AI in realistic situations? Q2: To what extent does the rephrasing of prompts lead LLMs to deviate from the edited knowledge memory? Q3: Which knowledge features are correlated with the performance and robustness of editing? Our experimental results uncover a substantial disparity between existing editing methods and the practical application of LLMs. On rephrased prompts that are complex and flexible but common in realistic applications, the performance of editing experiences a significant decline. Further analysis shows that more popular knowledge is memorized better, easier to recall, and more challenging to edit effectively.

GLaPE: Gold Label-agnostic Prompt Evaluation and Optimization for Large Language Model

Despite the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), their task performance remains sensitive to prompt design. Recent studies have explored leveraging the LLM itself as an optimizer to identify optimal prompts that maximize task accuracy. However, when evaluating prompts, such approaches heavily rely on elusive manually annotated gold labels to calculate task accuracy for each candidate prompt, which hinders the widespread implementation and generality. To overcome the limitation, this work proposes a gold label-agnostic prompt evaluation (GLaPE) to alleviate dependence on gold labels. Motivated by the observed correlation between self-consistency and the accuracy of the answer, we adopt self-consistency as the initial evaluation score. Subsequently, we refine the scores of prompts producing identical answers to be mutually consistent. Experimental results show that GLaPE provides reliable evaluations uniform with accuracy, even in the absence of gold labels. Moreover, on six popular reasoning tasks, our GLaPE-based prompt optimization yields effective prompts comparable to accuracy-based ones. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/thunderous77/GLaPE.

Sparse is Enough in Fine-tuning Pre-trained Large Language Model

With the prevalence of pre-training-fine-tuning paradigm, how to efficiently adapt the pre-trained model to the downstream tasks has been an intriguing issue. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have been proposed for low-cost adaptation, including Adapters, Bia-only, and the recently widely used Low-Rank Adaptation. Although these methods have demonstrated their effectiveness to some extent and have been widely applied, the underlying principles are still unclear. In this paper, we reveal the transition of loss landscape in the downstream domain from random initialization to pre-trained initialization, that is, from low-amplitude oscillation to high-amplitude oscillation. The parameter gradients exhibit a property akin to sparsity, where a small fraction of components dominate the total gradient norm, for instance, 1% of the components account for 99% of the gradient. This property ensures that the pre-trained model can easily find a flat minimizer which guarantees the model's ability to generalize even with a low number of trainable parameters. Based on this, we propose a gradient-based sparse fine-tuning algorithm, named Sparse Increment Fine-Tuning (SIFT), and validate its effectiveness on a range of tasks including the GLUE Benchmark and Instruction-tuning. The code is accessible at https://github.com/song-wx/SIFT/.