Improving Large Language Model Planning with Action Sequence Similarity

Planning is essential for artificial intelligence systems to look ahead and proactively determine a course of actions to reach objectives in the virtual and real world. Recent work on large language models (LLMs) sheds light on their planning capability in various tasks. However, it remains unclear what signals in the context influence the model performance. In this work, we explore how to improve the model planning capability through in-context learning (ICL), specifically, what signals can help select the exemplars. Through extensive experiments, we observe that commonly used problem similarity may result in false positives with drastically different plans, which can mislead the model. In response, we propose to sample and filter exemplars leveraging plan side action sequence similarity (AS). We propose GRASE-DC: a two-stage pipeline that first re-samples high AS exemplars and then curates the selected exemplars with dynamic clustering on AS to achieve a balance of relevance and diversity. Our experimental result confirms that GRASE-DC achieves significant performance improvement on various planning tasks (up to ~11-40 point absolute accuracy improvement with 27.3% fewer exemplars needed on average). With GRASE-DC* + VAL, where we iteratively apply GRASE-DC with a validator, we are able to even boost the performance by 18.9% more. Extensive analysis validates the consistent performance improvement of GRASE-DC with various backbone LLMs and on both classical planning and natural language planning benchmarks. GRASE-DC can further boost the planning accuracy by ~24 absolute points on harder problems using simpler problems as exemplars over a random baseline. This demonstrates its ability to generalize to out-of-distribution problems.

Training Language Models on the Knowledge Graph: Insights on Hallucinations and Their Detectability

While many capabilities of language models (LMs) improve with increased training budget, the influence of scale on hallucinations is not yet fully understood. Hallucinations come in many forms, and there is no universally accepted definition. We thus focus on studying only those hallucinations where a correct answer appears verbatim in the training set. To fully control the training data content, we construct a knowledge graph (KG)-based dataset, and use it to train a set of increasingly large LMs. We find that for a fixed dataset, larger and longer-trained LMs hallucinate less. However, hallucinating on $\leq5$% of the training data requires an order of magnitude larger model, and thus an order of magnitude more compute, than Hoffmann et al. (2022) reported was optimal. Given this costliness, we study how hallucination detectors depend on scale. While we see detector size improves performance on fixed LM's outputs, we find an inverse relationship between the scale of the LM and the detectability of its hallucinations.

Exploring and Benchmarking the Planning Capabilities of Large Language Models

We seek to elevate the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs)investigating four main directions. First, we construct a comprehensive benchmark suite encompassing both classical planning domains and natural language scenarios. This suite includes algorithms to generate instances with varying levels of difficulty, allowing for rigorous and systematic evaluation of LLM performance. Second, we investigate the use of in-context learning (ICL) to enhance LLM planning, exploring the direct relationship between increased context length and improved planning performance. Third, we demonstrate the positive impact of fine-tuning LLMs on optimal planning paths, as well as the effectiveness of incorporating model-driven search procedures. Finally, we investigate the performance of the proposed methods in out-of-distribution scenarios, assessing the ability to generalize to novel and unseen planning challenges.

Long-Span Question-Answering: Automatic Question Generation and QA-System Ranking via Side-by-Side Evaluation

We explore the use of long-context capabilities in large language models to create synthetic reading comprehension data from entire books. Previous efforts to construct such datasets relied on crowd-sourcing, but the emergence of transformers with a context size of 1 million or more tokens now enables entirely automatic approaches. Our objective is to test the capabilities of LLMs to analyze, understand, and reason over problems that require a detailed comprehension of long spans of text, such as questions involving character arcs, broader themes, or the consequences of early actions later in the story. We propose a holistic pipeline for automatic data generation including question generation, answering, and model scoring using an ``Evaluator''. We find that a relative approach, comparing answers between models in a pairwise fashion and ranking with a Bradley-Terry model, provides a more consistent and differentiating scoring mechanism than an absolute scorer that rates answers individually. We also show that LLMs from different model families produce moderate agreement in their ratings. We ground our approach using the manually curated NarrativeQA dataset, where our evaluator shows excellent agreement with human judgement and even finds errors in the dataset. Using our automatic evaluation approach, we show that using an entire book as context produces superior reading comprehension performance compared to baseline no-context (parametric knowledge only) and retrieval-based approaches.

Beyond Human Data: Scaling Self-Training for Problem-Solving with Language Models

Fine-tuning language models~(LMs) on human-generated data remains a prevalent practice. However, the performance of such models is often limited by the quantity and diversity of high-quality human data. In this paper, we explore whether we can go beyond human data on tasks where we have access to scalar feedback, for example, on math problems where one can verify correctness. To do so, we investigate a simple self-training method based on expectation-maximization, which we call ReST$^{EM}$, where we (1) generate samples from the model and filter them using binary feedback, (2) fine-tune the model on these samples, and (3) repeat this process a few times. Testing on advanced MATH reasoning and APPS coding benchmarks using PaLM-2 models, we find that ReST$^{EM}$ scales favorably with model size and significantly surpasses fine-tuning only on human data. Overall, our findings suggest self-training with feedback can substantially reduce dependence on human-generated data.

Frontier Language Models are not Robust to Adversarial Arithmetic, or "What do I need to say so you agree 2+2=5?

We introduce and study the problem of adversarial arithmetic, which provides a simple yet challenging testbed for language model alignment. This problem is comprised of arithmetic questions posed in natural language, with an arbitrary adversarial string inserted before the question is complete. Even in the simple setting of 1-digit addition problems, it is easy to find adversarial prompts that make all tested models (including PaLM2, GPT4, Claude2) misbehave, and even to steer models to a particular wrong answer. We additionally provide a simple algorithm for finding successful attacks by querying those same models, which we name "prompt inversion rejection sampling" (PIRS). We finally show that models can be partially hardened against these attacks via reinforcement learning and via agentic constitutional loops. However, we were not able to make a language model fully robust against adversarial arithmetic attacks.

Can Neural Network Memorization Be Localized?

Recent efforts at explaining the interplay of memorization and generalization in deep overparametrized networks have posited that neural networks $\textit{memorize}$ "hard" examples in the final few layers of the model. Memorization refers to the ability to correctly predict on $\textit{atypical}$ examples of the training set. In this work, we show that rather than being confined to individual layers, memorization is a phenomenon confined to a small set of neurons in various layers of the model. First, via three experimental sources of converging evidence, we find that most layers are redundant for the memorization of examples and the layers that contribute to example memorization are, in general, not the final layers. The three sources are $\textit{gradient accounting}$ (measuring the contribution to the gradient norms from memorized and clean examples), $\textit{layer rewinding}$ (replacing specific model weights of a converged model with previous training checkpoints), and $\textit{retraining}$ (training rewound layers only on clean examples). Second, we ask a more generic question: can memorization be localized $\textit{anywhere}$ in a model? We discover that memorization is often confined to a small number of neurons or channels (around 5) of the model. Based on these insights we propose a new form of dropout -- $\textit{example-tied dropout}$ that enables us to direct the memorization of examples to an apriori determined set of neurons. By dropping out these neurons, we are able to reduce the accuracy on memorized examples from $100\%\to3\%$, while also reducing the generalization gap.

The Role of Pre-training Data in Transfer Learning

The transfer learning paradigm of model pre-training and subsequent fine-tuning produces high-accuracy models. While most studies recommend scaling the pre-training size to benefit most from transfer learning, a question remains: what data and method should be used for pre-training? We investigate the impact of pre-training data distribution on the few-shot and full fine-tuning performance using 3 pre-training methods (supervised, contrastive language-image and image-image), 7 pre-training datasets, and 9 downstream datasets. Through extensive controlled experiments, we find that the choice of the pre-training data source is essential for the few-shot transfer, but its role decreases as more data is made available for fine-tuning. Additionally, we explore the role of data curation and examine the trade-offs between label noise and the size of the pre-training dataset. We find that using 2000X more pre-training data from LAION can match the performance of supervised ImageNet pre-training. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of pre-training methods, comparing language-image contrastive vs. image-image contrastive, and find that the latter leads to better downstream accuracy

Leveraging Unlabeled Data to Track Memorization

Deep neural networks may easily memorize noisy labels present in real-world data, which degrades their ability to generalize. It is therefore important to track and evaluate the robustness of models against noisy label memorization. We propose a metric, called susceptibility, to gauge such memorization for neural networks. Susceptibility is simple and easy to compute during training. Moreover, it does not require access to ground-truth labels and it only uses unlabeled data. We empirically show the effectiveness of our metric in tracking memorization on various architectures and datasets and provide theoretical insights into the design of the susceptibility metric. Finally, we show through extensive experiments on datasets with synthetic and real-world label noise that one can utilize susceptibility and the overall training accuracy to distinguish models that maintain a low memorization on the training set and generalize well to unseen clean data.

Layer-Stack Temperature Scaling

Recent works demonstrate that early layers in a neural network contain useful information for prediction. Inspired by this, we show that extending temperature scaling across all layers improves both calibration and accuracy. We call this procedure "layer-stack temperature scaling" (LATES). Informally, LATES grants each layer a weighted vote during inference. We evaluate it on five popular convolutional neural network architectures both in- and out-of-distribution and observe a consistent improvement over temperature scaling in terms of accuracy, calibration, and AUC. All conclusions are supported by comprehensive statistical analyses. Since LATES neither retrains the architecture nor introduces many more parameters, its advantages can be reaped without requiring additional data beyond what is used in temperature scaling. Finally, we show that combining LATES with Monte Carlo Dropout matches state-of-the-art results on CIFAR10/100.