User Connection and Resource Allocation Optimization in Blockchain Empowered Metaverse over 6G Wireless Communications

The convergence of blockchain, Metaverse, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) brings transformative digital opportunities alongside challenges like privacy and resource management. Addressing these, we focus on optimizing user connectivity and resource allocation in an NFT-centric and blockchain-enabled Metaverse in this paper. Through user work-offloading, we optimize data tasks, user connection parameters, and server computing frequency division. In the resource allocation phase, we optimize communication-computation resource distributions, including bandwidth, transmit power, and computing frequency. We introduce the trust-cost ratio (TCR), a pivotal measure combining trust scores from users' resources and server history with delay and energy costs. This balance ensures sustained user engagement and trust. The DASHF algorithm, central to our approach, encapsulates the Dinkelbach algorithm, alternating optimization, semidefinite relaxation (SDR), the Hungarian method, and a novel fractional programming technique from a recent IEEE JSAC paper [2]. The most challenging part of DASHF is to rewrite an optimization problem as Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Programming (QCQP) via carefully designed transformations, in order to be solved by SDR and the Hungarian algorithm. Extensive simulations validate the DASHF algorithm's efficacy, revealing critical insights for enhancing blockchain-Metaverse applications, especially with NFTs.

SimuCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Real-world Judgement Documents

With the development of deep learning, natural language processing technology has effectively improved the efficiency of various aspects of the traditional judicial industry. However, most current efforts focus solely on individual judicial stage, overlooking cross-stage collaboration. As the autonomous agents powered by large language models are becoming increasingly smart and able to make complex decisions in real-world settings, offering new insights for judicial intelligence. In this paper, (1) we introduce SimuCourt, a judicial benchmark that encompasses 420 judgment documents from real-world, spanning the three most common types of judicial cases, and a novel task Judicial Decision-Making to evaluate the judicial analysis and decision-making power of agents. To support this task, we construct a large-scale judicial knowledge base, JudicialKB, with multiple legal knowledge. (2) we propose a novel multi-agent framework, AgentsCourt. Our framework follows the real-world classic court trial process, consisting of court debate simulation, legal information retrieval and judgement refinement to simulate the decision-making of judge. (3) we perform extensive experiments, the results demonstrate that, our framework outperforms the existing advanced methods in various aspects, especially in generating legal grounds, where our model achieves significant improvements of 8.6% and 9.1% F1 score in the first and second instance settings, respectively.

Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Transfer Learning

Event Causality Identification (ECI) refers to detect causal relations between events in texts. However, most existing studies focus on sentence-level ECI with high-resource language, leaving more challenging document-level ECI (DECI) with low-resource languages under-explored. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous Graph Interaction Model with Multi-granularity Contrastive Transfer Learning (GIMC) for zero-shot cross-lingual document-level ECI. Specifically, we introduce a heterogeneous graph interaction network to model the long-distance dependencies between events that are scattered over document. Then, to improve cross-lingual transferability of causal knowledge learned from source language, we propose a multi-granularity contrastive transfer learning module to align the causal representations across languages. Extensive experiments show our framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art model by 9.4% and 8.2% of average F1 score on monolingual and multilingual scenarios respectively. Notably, in multilingual scenario, our zero-shot framework even exceeds GPT-3.5 with few-shot learning by 24.3% in overall performance.

Whispers that Shake Foundations: Analyzing and Mitigating False Premise Hallucinations in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities but still suffer from the issue of hallucinations. A significant type of this issue is the false premise hallucination, which we define as the phenomenon when LLMs generate hallucinated text when confronted with false premise questions. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the false premise hallucination and elucidate its internal working mechanism: a small subset of attention heads (which we designate as false premise heads) disturb the knowledge extraction process, leading to the occurrence of false premise hallucination. Based on our analysis, we propose \textbf{FAITH} (\textbf{F}alse premise \textbf{A}ttention head constra\textbf{I}ining for mi\textbf{T}igating \textbf{H}allucinations), a novel and effective method to mitigate false premise hallucinations. It constrains the false premise attention heads during the model inference process. Impressively, extensive experiments demonstrate that constraining only approximately $1\%$ of the attention heads in the model yields a notable increase of nearly $20\%$ of model performance.

Focus on Your Question! Interpreting and Mitigating Toxic CoT Problems in Commonsense Reasoning

Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, we find these CoT-like methods lead to a considerable number of originally correct answers turning wrong, which we define as the Toxic CoT problem. To interpret and mitigate this problem, we first utilize attribution tracing and causal tracing methods to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM during CoT reasoning. Through comparisons, we prove that the model exhibits information loss from the question over the shallow attention layers when generating rationales or answers. Based on the probing findings, we design a novel method called RIDERS (Residual decodIng and sERial-position Swap), which compensates for the information deficit in the model from both decoding and serial-position perspectives. Through extensive experiments on multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks, we validate that this method not only significantly eliminates Toxic CoT problems (decreased by 23.6%), but also effectively improves the model's overall commonsense reasoning performance (increased by 5.5%).

Cutting Off the Head Ends the Conflict: A Mechanism for Interpreting and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models

Recently, retrieval augmentation and tool augmentation have demonstrated a remarkable capability to expand the internal memory boundaries of language models (LMs) by providing external context. However, internal memory and external context inevitably clash, leading to knowledge conflicts within LMs. In this paper, we aim to interpret the mechanism of knowledge conflicts through the lens of information flow, and then mitigate conflicts by precise interventions at the pivotal point. We find there are some attention heads with opposite effects in the later layers, where memory heads can recall knowledge from internal memory, and context heads can retrieve knowledge from external context. Moreover, we reveal that the pivotal point at which knowledge conflicts emerge in LMs is the integration of inconsistent information flows by memory heads and context heads. Inspired by the insights, we propose a novel method called Pruning Head via PatH PatcHing (PH3), which can efficiently mitigate knowledge conflicts by pruning conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. PH3 can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory ($\uparrow$ 44.0%) or external context ($\uparrow$ 38.5%). Moreover, PH3 can also improve the performance of LMs on open-domain QA tasks. We also conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the cross-model, cross-relation, and cross-format generalization of our method.

Advancing Translation Preference Modeling with RLHF: A Step Towards Cost-Effective Solution

Faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance is the constant pursuit in machine translation. However, traditional metrics like \textit{BLEU} do not strictly align with human preference of translation quality. In this paper, we explore leveraging reinforcement learning with human feedback (\textit{RLHF}) to improve translation quality. It is non-trivial to collect a large high-quality dataset of human comparisons between translations, especially for low-resource languages. To address this issue, we propose a cost-effective preference learning strategy, optimizing reward models by distinguishing between human and machine translations. In this manner, the reward model learns the deficiencies of machine translation compared to human and guides subsequent improvements in machine translation. Experimental results demonstrate that \textit{RLHF} can effectively enhance translation quality and this improvement benefits other translation directions not trained with \textit{RLHF}. Further analysis indicates that the model's language capabilities play a crucial role in preference learning. A reward model with strong language capabilities can more sensitively learn the subtle differences in translation quality and align better with real human translation preferences.

Unveiling Linguistic Regions in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable cross-lingual alignment and generalization ability. Current research primarily focuses on improving LLMs' cross-lingual generalization capabilities. However, there is still a lack of research on the intrinsic mechanisms of how LLMs achieve cross-lingual alignment. From the perspective of region partitioning, this paper conducts several investigations on the linguistic competence of LLMs. We discover a core region in LLMs that corresponds to linguistic competence, accounting for approximately 1% of the total model parameters. Removing this core region by setting parameters to zero results in a significant performance decrease across 30 different languages. Furthermore, this core region exhibits significant dimensional dependency, perturbations to even a single parameter on specific dimensions leading to a loss of linguistic competence. Moreover, we discover that distinct regions exist for different monolingual families, and disruption to these specific regions substantially reduces the LLMs' proficiency in those corresponding languages. Our research also indicates that freezing the core linguistic region during further pre-training can mitigate the issue of catastrophic forgetting (CF), a common occurrence observed during further pre-training of LLMs. Overall, exploring the LLMs' functional regions provides insights into the foundation of their intelligence.

Tug-of-War Between Knowledge: Exploring and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) have demonstrated significant potential in refining and expanding their internal memory by retrieving evidence from external sources. However, RALMs will inevitably encounter knowledge conflicts when integrating their internal memory with external sources. Knowledge conflicts can ensnare RALMs in a tug-of-war between knowledge, limiting their practical applicability. In this paper, we focus on exploring and resolving knowledge conflicts in RALMs. First, we present an evaluation framework for assessing knowledge conflicts across various dimensions. Then, we investigate the behavior and preference of RALMs from the following two perspectives: (1) Conflicts between internal memory and external sources: We find that stronger RALMs emerge with the Dunning-Kruger effect, persistently favoring their faulty internal memory even when correct evidence is provided. Besides, RALMs exhibit an availability bias towards common knowledge; (2) Conflicts between truthful, irrelevant and misleading evidence: We reveal that RALMs follow the principle of majority rule, leaning towards placing trust in evidence that appears more frequently. Moreover, we find that RALMs exhibit confirmation bias, and are more willing to choose evidence that is consistent with their internal memory. To solve the challenge of knowledge conflicts, we propose a method called Conflict-Disentangle Contrastive Decoding (CD2) to better calibrate the model's confidence. Experimental results demonstrate that our CD2 can effectively resolve knowledge conflicts in RALMs.