ReflectEvo: Improving Meta Introspection of Small LLMs by Learning Self-Reflection

We present a novel pipeline, ReflectEvo, to demonstrate that small language models (SLMs) can enhance meta introspection through reflection learning. This process iteratively generates self-reflection for self-training, fostering a continuous and self-evolving process. Leveraging this pipeline, we construct ReflectEvo-460k, a large-scale, comprehensive, self-generated reflection dataset with broadened instructions and diverse multi-domain tasks. Building upon this dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of reflection learning to improve SLMs' reasoning abilities using SFT and DPO with remarkable performance, substantially boosting Llama-3 from 52.4% to 71.2% and Mistral from 44.4% to 71.1%. It validates that ReflectEvo can rival or even surpass the reasoning capability of the three prominent open-sourced models on BIG-bench without distillation from superior models or fine-grained human annotation. We further conduct a deeper analysis of the high quality of self-generated reflections and their impact on error localization and correction. Our work highlights the potential of continuously enhancing the reasoning performance of SLMs through iterative reflection learning in the long run.

Causal Graph Guided Steering of LLM Values via Prompts and Sparse Autoencoders

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into critical applications, aligning their behavior with human values presents significant challenges. Current methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often focus on a limited set of values and can be resource-intensive. Furthermore, the correlation between values has been largely overlooked and remains underutilized. Our framework addresses this limitation by mining a causal graph that elucidates the implicit relationships among various values within the LLMs. Leveraging the causal graph, we implement two lightweight mechanisms for value steering: prompt template steering and Sparse Autoencoder feature steering, and analyze the effects of altering one value dimension on others. Extensive experiments conducted on Gemma-2B-IT and Llama3-8B-IT demonstrate the effectiveness and controllability of our steering methods.

Labels Need Prompts Too: Mask Matching for Natural Language Understanding Tasks

Textual label names (descriptions) are typically semantically rich in many natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. In this paper, we incorporate the prompting methodology, which is widely used to enrich model input, into the label side for the first time. Specifically, we propose a Mask Matching method, which equips an input with a prompt and its label with another, and then makes predictions by matching their mask representations. We evaluate our method extensively on 8 NLU tasks with 14 datasets. The experimental results show that Mask Matching significantly outperforms its counterparts of fine-tuning and conventional prompt-tuning, setting up state-of-the-art performances in several datasets. Mask Matching is particularly good at handling NLU tasks with large label counts and informative label names. As pioneering efforts that investigate the label-side prompt, we also discuss open issues for future study.

Evaluating ChatGPT's Information Extraction Capabilities: An Assessment of Performance, Explainability, Calibration, and Faithfulness

The capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to comprehend user intent and provide reasonable responses has made them extremely popular lately. In this paper, we focus on assessing the overall ability of ChatGPT using 7 fine-grained information extraction (IE) tasks. Specially, we present the systematically analysis by measuring ChatGPT's performance, explainability, calibration, and faithfulness, and resulting in 15 keys from either the ChatGPT or domain experts. Our findings reveal that ChatGPT's performance in Standard-IE setting is poor, but it surprisingly exhibits excellent performance in the OpenIE setting, as evidenced by human evaluation. In addition, our research indicates that ChatGPT provides high-quality and trustworthy explanations for its decisions. However, there is an issue of ChatGPT being overconfident in its predictions, which resulting in low calibration. Furthermore, ChatGPT demonstrates a high level of faithfulness to the original text in the majority of cases. We manually annotate and release the test sets of 7 fine-grained IE tasks contains 14 datasets to further promote the research. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/pkuserc/ChatGPT_for_IE.