Democratizing Reasoning Ability: Tailored Learning from Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive emergent abilities in natural language processing, but their democratization is hindered due to huge computation requirements and closed-source nature. Recent research on advancing open-source smaller LMs by distilling knowledge from black-box LLMs has obtained promising results in the instruction-following ability. However, the reasoning ability which is more challenging to foster, is relatively rarely explored. In this paper, we propose a tailored learning approach to distill such reasoning ability to smaller LMs to facilitate the democratization of the exclusive reasoning ability. In contrast to merely employing LLM as a data annotator, we exploit the potential of LLM as a reasoning teacher by building an interactive multi-round learning paradigm. This paradigm enables the student to expose its deficiencies to the black-box teacher who then can provide customized training data in return. Further, to exploit the reasoning potential of the smaller LM, we propose self-reflection learning to motivate the student to learn from self-made mistakes. The learning from self-reflection and LLM are all tailored to the student's learning status, thanks to the seamless integration with the multi-round learning paradigm. Comprehensive experiments and analysis on mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code will be available at https://github.com/Raibows/Learn-to-Reason.

Are Structural Concepts Universal in Transformer Language Models? Towards Interpretable Cross-Lingual Generalization

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited considerable cross-lingual generalization abilities, whereby they implicitly transfer knowledge across languages. However, the transfer is not equally successful for all languages, especially for low-resource ones, which poses an ongoing challenge. It is unclear whether we have reached the limits of implicit cross-lingual generalization and if explicit knowledge transfer is viable. In this paper, we investigate the potential for explicitly aligning conceptual correspondence between languages to enhance cross-lingual generalization. Using the syntactic aspect of language as a testbed, our analyses of 43 languages reveal a high degree of alignability among the spaces of structural concepts within each language for both encoder-only and decoder-only LLMs. We then propose a meta-learning-based method to learn to align conceptual spaces of different languages, which facilitates zero-shot and few-shot generalization in concept classification and also offers insights into the cross-lingual in-context learning phenomenon. Experiments on syntactic analysis tasks show that our approach achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods and narrows the performance gap between languages, particularly benefiting those with limited resources.

Loose lips sink ships: Mitigating Length Bias in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Reinforcement learning from human feedback serves as a crucial bridge, aligning large language models with human and societal values. This alignment requires a vast corpus of human feedback to learn a reward model, which is subsequently used to finetune language models. However, we have identified that the reward model often finds shortcuts to bypass its intended objectives, misleadingly assuming that humans prefer longer responses. The emergence of length bias often induces the model to favor longer outputs, yet it doesn't equate to an increase in helpful information within these outputs. In this paper, we propose an innovative solution, applying the Product-of-Experts (PoE) technique to separate reward modeling from the influence of sequence length. In our framework, the main expert concentrates on understanding human intents, while the biased expert targets the identification and capture of length bias. To further enhance the learning of bias, we introduce perturbations into the bias-focused expert, disrupting the flow of semantic information. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach, indicating that language model performance is improved, irrespective of sequence length.

Auto Search Indexer for End-to-End Document Retrieval

Generative retrieval, which is a new advanced paradigm for document retrieval, has recently attracted research interests, since it encodes all documents into the model and directly generates the retrieved documents. However, its power is still underutilized since it heavily relies on the "preprocessed" document identifiers (docids), thus limiting its retrieval performance and ability to retrieve new documents. In this paper, we propose a novel fully end-to-end retrieval paradigm. It can not only end-to-end learn the best docids for existing and new documents automatically via a semantic indexing module, but also perform end-to-end document retrieval via an encoder-decoder-based generative model, namely Auto Search Indexer (ASI). Besides, we design a reparameterization mechanism to combine the above two modules into a joint optimization framework. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model over advanced baselines on both public and industrial datasets and also verify the ability to deal with new documents.

Improving Generalization of Alignment with Human Preferences through Group Invariant Learning

The success of AI assistants based on language models (LLMs) hinges crucially on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which enables the generation of responses more aligned with human preferences. As universal AI assistants, there's a growing expectation for them to perform consistently across various domains. However, previous work shows that Reinforcement Learning (RL) often exploits shortcuts to attain high rewards and overlooks challenging samples. This focus on quick reward gains undermines both the stability in training and the model's ability to generalize to new, unseen data. In this work, we propose a novel approach that can learn a consistent policy via RL across various data groups or domains. Given the challenges associated with acquiring group annotations, our method automatically classifies data into different groups, deliberately maximizing performance variance. Then, we optimize the policy to perform well on challenging groups. Lastly, leveraging the established groups, our approach adaptively adjusts the exploration space, allocating more learning capacity to more challenging data and preventing the model from over-optimizing on simpler data. Experimental results indicate that our approach significantly enhances training stability and model generalization.

RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models' Human-like Behavior Mechanisms

Reports of human-like behaviors in foundation models are growing, with psychological theories providing enduring tools to investigate these behaviors. However, current research tends to directly apply these human-oriented tools without verifying the faithfulness of their outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a framework, RealBehavior, which is designed to characterize the humanoid behaviors of models faithfully. Beyond simply measuring behaviors, our framework assesses the faithfulness of results based on reproducibility, internal and external consistency, and generalizability. Our findings suggest that a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-like behaviors. Moreover, we discuss the impacts of aligning models with human and social values, arguing for the necessity of diversifying alignment objectives to prevent the creation of models with restricted characteristics.

Reading Order Matters: Information Extraction from Visually-rich Documents by Token Path Prediction

Recent advances in multimodal pre-trained models have significantly improved information extraction from visually-rich documents (VrDs), in which named entity recognition (NER) is treated as a sequence-labeling task of predicting the BIO entity tags for tokens, following the typical setting of NLP. However, BIO-tagging scheme relies on the correct order of model inputs, which is not guaranteed in real-world NER on scanned VrDs where text are recognized and arranged by OCR systems. Such reading order issue hinders the accurate marking of entities by BIO-tagging scheme, making it impossible for sequence-labeling methods to predict correct named entities. To address the reading order issue, we introduce Token Path Prediction (TPP), a simple prediction head to predict entity mentions as token sequences within documents. Alternative to token classification, TPP models the document layout as a complete directed graph of tokens, and predicts token paths within the graph as entities. For better evaluation of VrD-NER systems, we also propose two revised benchmark datasets of NER on scanned documents which can reflect real-world scenarios. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and suggest its potential to be a universal solution to various information extraction tasks on documents.

Image super-resolution via dynamic network

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) depend on deep network architectures to extract accurate information for image super-resolution. However, obtained information of these CNNs cannot completely express predicted high-quality images for complex scenes. In this paper, we present a dynamic network for image super-resolution (DSRNet), which contains a residual enhancement block, wide enhancement block, feature refinement block and construction block. The residual enhancement block is composed of a residual enhanced architecture to facilitate hierarchical features for image super-resolution. To enhance robustness of obtained super-resolution model for complex scenes, a wide enhancement block achieves a dynamic architecture to learn more robust information to enhance applicability of an obtained super-resolution model for varying scenes. To prevent interference of components in a wide enhancement block, a refinement block utilizes a stacked architecture to accurately learn obtained features. Also, a residual learning operation is embedded in the refinement block to prevent long-term dependency problem. Finally, a construction block is responsible for reconstructing high-quality images. Designed heterogeneous architecture can not only facilitate richer structural information, but also be lightweight, which is suitable for mobile digital devices. Experimental results shows that our method is more competitive in terms of performance and recovering time of image super-resolution and complexity. The code of DSRNet can be obtained at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/DSRNet.

RethinkingTMSC: An Empirical Study for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification

Recently, Target-oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (TMSC) has gained significant attention among scholars. However, current multimodal models have reached a performance bottleneck. To investigate the causes of this problem, we perform extensive empirical evaluation and in-depth analysis of the datasets to answer the following questions: Q1: Are the modalities equally important for TMSC? Q2: Which multimodal fusion modules are more effective? Q3: Do existing datasets adequately support the research? Our experiments and analyses reveal that the current TMSC systems primarily rely on the textual modality, as most of targets' sentiments can be determined solely by text. Consequently, we point out several directions to work on for the TMSC task in terms of model design and dataset construction. The code and data can be found in https://github.com/Junjie-Ye/RethinkingTMSC.

Universal Multi-modal Entity Alignment via Iteratively Fusing Modality Similarity Paths

The objective of Entity Alignment (EA) is to identify equivalent entity pairs from multiple Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and create a more comprehensive and unified KG. The majority of EA methods have primarily focused on the structural modality of KGs, lacking exploration of multi-modal information. A few multi-modal EA methods have made good attempts in this field. Still, they have two shortcomings: (1) inconsistent and inefficient modality modeling that designs complex and distinct models for each modality; (2) ineffective modality fusion due to the heterogeneous nature of modalities in EA. To tackle these challenges, we propose PathFusion, consisting of two main components: (1) MSP, a unified modeling approach that simplifies the alignment process by constructing paths connecting entities and modality nodes to represent multiple modalities; (2) IRF, an iterative fusion method that effectively combines information from different modalities using the path as an information carrier. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of PathFusion over state-of-the-art methods, with 22.4%-28.9% absolute improvement on Hits@1, and 0.194-0.245 absolute improvement on MRR.