Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting

Modern large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, exhibit a remarkable capacity for role-playing, enabling them to embody not only human characters but also non-human entities like a Linux terminal. This versatility allows them to simulate complex human-like interactions and behaviors within various contexts, as well as to emulate specific objects or systems. While these capabilities have enhanced user engagement and introduced novel modes of interaction, the influence of role-playing on LLMs' reasoning abilities remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce a strategically designed role-play prompting methodology and assess its performance under the zero-shot setting across twelve diverse reasoning benchmarks, encompassing arithmetic, commonsense reasoning, symbolic reasoning, and more. Leveraging models such as ChatGPT and Llama 2, our empirical results illustrate that role-play prompting consistently surpasses the standard zero-shot approach across most datasets. Notably, accuracy on AQuA rises from 53.5% to 63.8%, and on Last Letter from 23.8% to 84.2%. Beyond enhancing contextual understanding, we posit that role-play prompting serves as an implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trigger, thereby improving the quality of reasoning. By comparing our approach with the Zero-Shot-CoT technique, which prompts the model to "think step by step", we further demonstrate that role-play prompting can generate a more effective CoT. This highlights its potential to augment the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

PromptRank: Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction Using Prompt

The keyphrase extraction task refers to the automatic selection of phrases from a given document to summarize its core content. State-of-the-art (SOTA) performance has recently been achieved by embedding-based algorithms, which rank candidates according to how similar their embeddings are to document embeddings. However, such solutions either struggle with the document and candidate length discrepancies or fail to fully utilize the pre-trained language model (PLM) without further fine-tuning. To this end, in this paper, we propose a simple yet effective unsupervised approach, PromptRank, based on the PLM with an encoder-decoder architecture. Specifically, PromptRank feeds the document into the encoder and calculates the probability of generating the candidate with a designed prompt by the decoder. We extensively evaluate the proposed PromptRank on six widely used benchmarks. PromptRank outperforms the SOTA approach MDERank, improving the F1 score relatively by 34.18%, 24.87%, and 17.57% for 5, 10, and 15 returned results, respectively. This demonstrates the great potential of using prompt for unsupervised keyphrase extraction. We release our code at https://github.com/HLT-NLP/PromptRank.

CyFormer: Accurate State-of-Health Prediction of Lithium-Ion Batteries via Cyclic Attention

Predicting the State-of-Health (SoH) of lithium-ion batteries is a fundamental task of battery management systems on electric vehicles. It aims at estimating future SoH based on historical aging data. Most existing deep learning methods rely on filter-based feature extractors (e.g., CNN or Kalman filters) and recurrent time sequence models. Though efficient, they generally ignore cyclic features and the domain gap between training and testing batteries. To address this problem, we present CyFormer, a transformer-based cyclic time sequence model for SoH prediction. Instead of the conventional CNN-RNN structure, we adopt an encoder-decoder architecture. In the encoder, row-wise and column-wise attention blocks effectively capture intra-cycle and inter-cycle connections and extract cyclic features. In the decoder, the SoH queries cross-attend to these features to form the final predictions. We further utilize a transfer learning strategy to narrow the domain gap between the training and testing set. To be specific, we use fine-tuning to shift the model to a target working condition. Finally, we made our model more efficient by pruning. The experiment shows that our method attains an MAE of 0.75\% with only 10\% data for fine-tuning on a testing battery, surpassing prior methods by a large margin. Effective and robust, our method provides a potential solution for all cyclic time sequence prediction tasks.