Towards Uncertainty-Aware Language Agent

While Language Agents have achieved promising success by placing Large Language Models at the core of a more versatile design that dynamically interacts with the external world, the existing approaches neglect the notion of uncertainty during these interactions. We present the Uncertainty-Aware Language Agent (UALA), a framework that orchestrates the interaction between the agent and the external world using uncertainty quantification. Compared with other well-known counterparts like ReAct, our extensive experiments across 3 representative tasks (HotpotQA, StrategyQA, MMLU) and various LLM sizes demonstrate that UALA brings a significant improvement of performance, while having a substantially lower reliance on the external world (i.e., reduced number of tool calls and tokens). Our analyses provide various insights including the great potential of UALA compared with agent fine-tuning, and underscore the unreliability of verbalised confidence of LLMs as a proxy for uncertainty.

POSQA: Probe the World Models of LLMs with Size Comparisons

Embodied language comprehension emphasizes that language understanding is not solely a matter of mental processing in the brain but also involves interactions with the physical and social environment. With the explosive growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their already ubiquitous presence in our daily lives, it is becoming increasingly necessary to verify their real-world understanding. Inspired by cognitive theories, we propose POSQA: a Physical Object Size Question Answering dataset with simple size comparison questions to examine the extremity and analyze the potential mechanisms of the embodied comprehension of the latest LLMs. We show that even the largest LLMs today perform poorly under the zero-shot setting. We then push their limits with advanced prompting techniques and external knowledge augmentation. Furthermore, we investigate whether their real-world comprehension primarily derives from contextual information or internal weights and analyse the impact of prompt formats and report bias of different objects. Our results show that real-world understanding that LLMs shaped from textual data can be vulnerable to deception and confusion by the surface form of prompts, which makes it less aligned with human behaviours.

Reward Engineering for Generating Semi-structured Explanation

Semi-structured explanation depicts the implicit process of a reasoner with an explicit representation. This explanation highlights how available information in a specific query is supplemented with information a reasoner produces from its internal weights towards generating an answer. Despite the recent improvements in generative capabilities of language models, producing structured explanations to verify model's true reasoning capabilities remains a challenge. This issue is particularly pronounced for not-so-large LMs, as the reasoner is expected to couple a sequential answer with a structured explanation which embodies both the correct presentation and the correct reasoning process. In this work, we first underscore the limitations of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) in tackling this challenge, and then introduce a carefully crafted reward engineering method in reinforcement learning (RL) to better address this problem. We investigate multiple reward aggregation methods and provide a detailed discussion which sheds light on the promising potential of RL for future research. Our proposed reward on two semi-structured explanation generation benchmarks (ExplaGraph and COPA-SSE) achieves new state-of-the-art results.

PiVe: Prompting with Iterative Verification Improving Graph-based Generative Capability of LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great abilities of solving various natural language tasks in different domains. Due to the training objective of LLMs and their pretraining data, LLMs are not very well equipped for tasks involving structured data generation. We propose a framework, Prompting with Iterative Verification (PiVe), to improve graphbased generative capability of LLMs. We show how a small language model could be trained to act as a verifier module for the output of an LLM (i.e., ChatGPT), and to iteratively improve its performance via fine-grained corrective instructions. Additionally, we show how the verifier module could apply iterative corrections offline for a more cost-effective solution to the text-to-graph generation task. Experiments on three graph-based datasets show consistent improvement gained via PiVe. Additionally, we highlight how the proposed verifier module can be used as a data augmentation tool to help improve the quality of automatically generated parallel text-graph datasets. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Jiuzhouh/PiVe.

Self-supervised Graph Masking Pre-training for Graph-to-Text Generation

Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) have advanced Graph-to-Text (G2T) generation by processing the linearised version of a graph. However, the linearisation is known to ignore the structural information. Additionally, PLMs are typically pre-trained on free text which introduces domain mismatch between pre-training and downstream G2T generation tasks. To address these shortcomings, we propose graph masking pre-training strategies that neither require supervision signals nor adjust the architecture of the underlying pre-trained encoder-decoder model. When used with a pre-trained T5, our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on WebNLG+2020 and EventNarrative G2T generation datasets. Our method also shows to be very effective in the low-resource setting.

Generating Diverse Descriptions from Semantic Graphs

Text generation from semantic graphs is traditionally performed with deterministic methods, which generate a unique description given an input graph. However, the generation problem admits a range of acceptable textual outputs, exhibiting lexical, syntactic and semantic variation. To address this disconnect, we present two main contributions. First, we propose a stochastic graph-to-text model, incorporating a latent variable in an encoder-decoder model, and its use in an ensemble. Second, to assess the diversity of the generated sentences, we propose a new automatic evaluation metric which jointly evaluates output diversity and quality in a multi-reference setting. We evaluate the models on WebNLG datasets in English and Russian, and show an ensemble of stochastic models produces diverse sets of generated sentences, while retaining similar quality to state-of-the-art models.