From Model-centered to Human-Centered: Revision Distance as a Metric for Text Evaluation in LLMs-based Applications

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is fundamental, particularly in the context of practical applications. Conventional evaluation methods, typically designed primarily for LLM development, yield numerical scores that ignore the user experience. Therefore, our study shifts the focus from model-centered to human-centered evaluation in the context of AI-powered writing assistance applications. Our proposed metric, termed ``Revision Distance,'' utilizes LLMs to suggest revision edits that mimic the human writing process. It is determined by counting the revision edits generated by LLMs. Benefiting from the generated revision edit details, our metric can provide a self-explained text evaluation result in a human-understandable manner beyond the context-independent score. Our results show that for the easy-writing task, ``Revision Distance'' is consistent with established metrics (ROUGE, Bert-score, and GPT-score), but offers more insightful, detailed feedback and better distinguishes between texts. Moreover, in the context of challenging academic writing tasks, our metric still delivers reliable evaluations where other metrics tend to struggle. Furthermore, our metric also holds significant potential for scenarios lacking reference texts.

Let's Learn Step by Step: Enhancing In-Context Learning Ability with Curriculum Learning

Demonstration ordering, which is an important strategy for in-context learning (ICL), can significantly affects the performance of large language models (LLMs). However, most of the current approaches of ordering require additional knowledge and similarity calculation. We advocate the few-shot in-context curriculum learning (ICCL), a simple but effective demonstration ordering method for ICL, which implies gradually increasing the complexity of prompt demonstrations during the inference process. Then we design three experiments to discuss the effectiveness of ICCL, the formation mechanism of LLM's ICCL capability, and the impact of ordering subjects. Experimental results demonstrate that ICCL, developed during the instruction-tuning stage, is effective for open-source LLMs. Moreover, LLMs exhibit a weaker capacity compared to humans in discerning the difficulty levels of demonstrations. We release our code at https://github.com/61peng/curri_learning.

Know Where to Go: Make LLM a Relevant, Responsible, and Trustworthy Searcher

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown the potential to improve relevance and provide direct answers in web searches. However, challenges arise in validating the reliability of generated results and the credibility of contributing sources, due to the limitations of traditional information retrieval algorithms and the LLM hallucination problem. Aiming to create a "PageRank" for the LLM era, we strive to transform LLM into a relevant, responsible, and trustworthy searcher. We propose a novel generative retrieval framework leveraging the knowledge of LLMs to foster a direct link between queries and online sources. This framework consists of three core modules: Generator, Validator, and Optimizer, each focusing on generating trustworthy online sources, verifying source reliability, and refining unreliable sources, respectively. Extensive experiments and evaluations highlight our method's superior relevance, responsibility, and trustfulness against various SOTA methods.

Low-Resource Multi-Granularity Academic Function Recognition Based on Multiple Prompt Knowledge

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs), e.g., SciBERT, generally requires large numbers of annotated data to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a range of NLP tasks in the scientific domain. However, obtaining the fine-tune data for scientific NLP task is still challenging and expensive. Inspired by recent advancement in prompt learning, in this paper, we propose the Mix Prompt Tuning (MPT), which is a semi-supervised method to alleviate the dependence on annotated data and improve the performance of multi-granularity academic function recognition tasks with a small number of labeled examples. Specifically, the proposed method provides multi-perspective representations by combining manual prompt templates with automatically learned continuous prompt templates to help the given academic function recognition task take full advantage of knowledge in PLMs. Based on these prompt templates and the fine-tuned PLM, a large number of pseudo labels are assigned to the unlabeled examples. Finally, we fine-tune the PLM using the pseudo training set. We evaluate our method on three academic function recognition tasks of different granularity including the citation function, the abstract sentence function, and the keyword function, with datasets from computer science domain and biomedical domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and statistically significant improvements against strong baselines. In particular, it achieves an average increase of 5% in Macro-F1 score compared with fine-tuning, and 6% in Macro-F1 score compared with other semi-supervised method under low-resource settings. In addition, MPT is a general method that can be easily applied to other low-resource scientific classification tasks.