BeamAggR: Beam Aggregation Reasoning over Multi-source Knowledge for Multi-hop Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, they still suffer from factual errors when tackling knowledge-intensive tasks. Retrieval-augmented reasoning represents a promising approach. However, significant challenges still persist, including inaccurate and insufficient retrieval for complex questions, as well as difficulty in integrating multi-source knowledge. To address this, we propose Beam Aggregation Reasoning, BeamAggR, a reasoning framework for knowledge-intensive multi-hop QA. BeamAggR explores and prioritizes promising answers at each hop of question. Concretely, we parse the complex questions into trees, which include atom and composite questions, followed by bottom-up reasoning. For atomic questions, the LLM conducts reasoning on multi-source knowledge to get answer candidates. For composite questions, the LLM combines beam candidates, explores multiple reasoning paths through probabilistic aggregation, and prioritizes the most promising trajectory. Extensive experiments on four open-domain multi-hop reasoning datasets show that our method significantly outperforms SOTA methods by 8.5%. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that BeamAggR elicits better knowledge collaboration and answer aggregation.

An Information Bottleneck Perspective for Effective Noise Filtering on Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation integrates the capabilities of large language models with relevant information retrieved from an extensive corpus, yet encounters challenges when confronted with real-world noisy data. One recent solution is to train a filter module to find relevant content but only achieve suboptimal noise compression. In this paper, we propose to introduce the information bottleneck theory into retrieval-augmented generation. Our approach involves the filtration of noise by simultaneously maximizing the mutual information between compression and ground output, while minimizing the mutual information between compression and retrieved passage. In addition, we derive the formula of information bottleneck to facilitate its application in novel comprehensive evaluations, the selection of supervised fine-tuning data, and the construction of reinforcement learning rewards. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements across various question answering datasets, not only in terms of the correctness of answer generation but also in the conciseness with $2.5\%$ compression rate.

Divide-and-Conquer Meets Consensus: Unleashing the Power of Functions in Code Generation

Despite recent progress made by large language models in code generation, they still struggle with programs that meet complex requirements. Recent work utilizes plan-and-solve decomposition to decrease the complexity and leverage self-tests to refine the generated program. Yet, planning deep-inside requirements in advance can be challenging, and the tests need to be accurate to accomplish self-improvement. To this end, we propose FunCoder, a code generation framework incorporating the divide-and-conquer strategy with functional consensus. Specifically, FunCoder recursively branches off sub-functions as smaller goals during code generation, represented by a tree hierarchy. These sub-functions are then composited to attain more complex objectives. Additionally, we designate functions via a consensus formed by identifying similarities in program behavior, mitigating error propagation. FunCoder outperforms state-of-the-art methods by +9.8% on average in HumanEval, MBPP, xCodeEval and MATH with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Moreover, our method demonstrates superiority on smaller models: With FunCoder, StableCode-3b surpasses GPT-3.5 by +18.6% and achieves 97.7% of GPT-4's performance on HumanEval. Further analysis reveals that our proposed dynamic function decomposition is capable of handling complex requirements, and the functional consensus prevails over self-testing in correctness evaluation.

Apollo's Oracle: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning in Multi-Agent Debates

Multi-agent debate systems are designed to derive accurate and consistent conclusions through adversarial interactions among agents. However, these systems often encounter challenges due to cognitive constraints, manifesting as (1) agents' obstinate adherence to incorrect viewpoints and (2) their propensity to abandon correct viewpoints. These issues are primarily responsible for the ineffectiveness of such debates. Addressing the challenge of cognitive constraints, we introduce a novel framework, the Multi-Agent Debate with Retrieval Augmented (MADRA). MADRA incorporates retrieval of prior knowledge into the debate process, effectively breaking cognitive constraints and enhancing the agents' reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we have developed a self-selection module within this framework, enabling agents to autonomously select pertinent evidence, thereby minimizing the impact of irrelevant or noisy data. We have comprehensively tested and analyzed MADRA across six diverse datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances performance across various tasks, proving the effectiveness of our proposed method.

TimeBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Temporal Reasoning Abilities in Large Language Models

Understanding time is a pivotal aspect of human cognition, crucial in the broader framework of grasping the intricacies of the world. Previous studies typically focus on specific aspects of time, lacking a comprehensive temporal reasoning benchmark. To address this issue, we propose TimeBench, a comprehensive hierarchical temporal reasoning benchmark that covers a broad spectrum of temporal reasoning phenomena, which provides a thorough evaluation for investigating the temporal reasoning capabilities of large language models. We conduct extensive experiments on popular LLMs, such as GPT-4, LLaMA2, and Mistral, incorporating chain-of-thought prompting. Our experimental results indicate a significant performance gap between the state-of-the-art LLMs and humans, highlighting that there is still a considerable distance to cover in temporal reasoning. We aspire for TimeBench to serve as a comprehensive benchmark, fostering research in temporal reasoning for LLMs. Our resource is available at https://github.com/zchuz/TimeBench

Trends in Integration of Knowledge and Large Language Models: A Survey and Taxonomy of Methods, Benchmarks, and Applications

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit superior performance on various natural language tasks, but they are susceptible to issues stemming from outdated data and domain-specific limitations. In order to address these challenges, researchers have pursued two primary strategies, knowledge editing and retrieval augmentation, to enhance LLMs by incorporating external information from different aspects. Nevertheless, there is still a notable absence of a comprehensive survey. In this paper, we propose a review to discuss the trends in integration of knowledge and large language models, including taxonomy of methods, benchmarks, and applications. In addition, we conduct an in-depth analysis of different methods and point out potential research directions in the future. We hope this survey offers the community quick access and a comprehensive overview of this research area, with the intention of inspiring future research endeavors.

A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has marked a significant breakthrough in natural language processing (NLP), leading to remarkable advancements in text understanding and generation. Nevertheless, alongside these strides, LLMs exhibit a critical tendency to produce hallucinations, resulting in content that is inconsistent with real-world facts or user inputs. This phenomenon poses substantial challenges to their practical deployment and raises concerns over the reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios, which attracts increasing attention to detect and mitigate these hallucinations. In this survey, we aim to provide a thorough and in-depth overview of recent advances in the field of LLM hallucinations. We begin with an innovative taxonomy of LLM hallucinations, then delve into the factors contributing to hallucinations. Subsequently, we present a comprehensive overview of hallucination detection methods and benchmarks. Additionally, representative approaches designed to mitigate hallucinations are introduced accordingly. Finally, we analyze the challenges that highlight the current limitations and formulate open questions, aiming to delineate pathways for future research on hallucinations in LLMs.

Knowledge-enhanced Memory Model for Emotional Support Conversation

The prevalence of mental disorders has become a significant issue, leading to the increased focus on Emotional Support Conversation as an effective supplement for mental health support. Existing methods have achieved compelling results, however, they still face three challenges: 1) variability of emotions, 2) practicality of the response, and 3) intricate strategy modeling. To address these challenges, we propose a novel knowledge-enhanced Memory mODEl for emotional suppoRt coNversation (MODERN). Specifically, we first devise a knowledge-enriched dialogue context encoding to perceive the dynamic emotion change of different periods of the conversation for coherent user state modeling and select context-related concepts from ConceptNet for practical response generation. Thereafter, we implement a novel memory-enhanced strategy modeling module to model the semantic patterns behind the strategy categories. Extensive experiments on a widely used large-scale dataset verify the superiority of our model over cutting-edge baselines.

A Survey of Chain of Thought Reasoning: Advances, Frontiers and Future

Chain-of-thought reasoning, a cognitive process fundamental to human intelligence, has garnered significant attention in the realm of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. However, there still remains a lack of a comprehensive survey for this arena. To this end, we take the first step and present a thorough survey of this research field carefully and widely. We use X-of-Thought to refer to Chain-of-Thought in a broad sense. In detail, we systematically organize the current research according to the taxonomies of methods, including XoT construction, XoT structure variants, and enhanced XoT. Additionally, we describe XoT with frontier applications, covering planning, tool use, and distillation. Furthermore, we address challenges and discuss some future directions, including faithfulness, multi-modal, and theory. We hope this survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers seeking to innovate within the domain of chain-of-thought reasoning.

Large Language Models Are Also Good Prototypical Commonsense Reasoners

Commonsense reasoning is a pivotal skill for large language models, yet it presents persistent challenges in specific tasks requiring this competence. Traditional fine-tuning approaches can be resource-intensive and potentially compromise a model's generalization capacity. Furthermore, state-of-the-art language models like GPT-3.5 and Claude are primarily accessible through API calls, which makes fine-tuning models challenging. To address these challenges, we draw inspiration from the outputs of large models for tailored tasks and semi-automatically developed a set of novel prompts from several perspectives, including task-relevance, supportive evidence generation (e.g. chain-of-thought and knowledge), diverse path decoding to aid the model. Experimental results on ProtoQA dataset demonstrate that with better designed prompts we can achieve the new state-of-art(SOTA) on the ProtoQA leaderboard, improving the Max Answer@1 score by 8%, Max Incorrect@1 score by 4% (breakthrough 50% for the first time) compared to the previous SOTA model and achieved an improvement on StrategyQA and CommonsenseQA2.0 (3% and 1%, respectively). Furthermore, with the generated Chain-of-Thought and knowledge, we can improve the interpretability of the model while also surpassing the previous SOTA models. We hope that our work can provide insight for the NLP community to develop better prompts and explore the potential of large language models for more complex reasoning tasks.