Measuring Cross-lingual Transfer in Bytes

Multilingual pretraining has been a successful solution to the challenges posed by the lack of resources for languages. These models can transfer knowledge to target languages with minimal or no examples. Recent research suggests that monolingual models also have a similar capability, but the mechanisms behind this transfer remain unclear. Some studies have explored factors like language contamination and syntactic similarity. An emerging line of research suggests that the representations learned by language models contain two components: a language-specific and a language-agnostic component. The latter is responsible for transferring a more universal knowledge. However, there is a lack of comprehensive exploration of these properties across diverse target languages. To investigate this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment inspired by the work on the Scaling Laws for Transfer. We measured the amount of data transferred from a source language to a target language and found that models initialized from diverse languages perform similarly to a target language in a cross-lingual setting. This was surprising because the amount of data transferred to 10 diverse target languages, such as Spanish, Korean, and Finnish, was quite similar. We also found evidence that this transfer is not related to language contamination or language proximity, which strengthens the hypothesis that the model also relies on language-agnostic knowledge. Our experiments have opened up new possibilities for measuring how much data represents the language-agnostic representations learned during pretraining.

Quati: A Brazilian Portuguese Information Retrieval Dataset from Native Speakers

Despite Portuguese being one of the most spoken languages in the world, there is a lack of high-quality information retrieval datasets in that language. We present Quati, a dataset specifically designed for the Brazilian Portuguese language. It comprises a collection of queries formulated by native speakers and a curated set of documents sourced from a selection of high-quality Brazilian Portuguese websites. These websites are frequented more likely by real users compared to those randomly scraped, ensuring a more representative and relevant corpus. To label the query-document pairs, we use a state-of-the-art LLM, which shows inter-annotator agreement levels comparable to human performance in our assessments. We provide a detailed description of our annotation methodology to enable others to create similar datasets for other languages, providing a cost-effective way of creating high-quality IR datasets with an arbitrary number of labeled documents per query. Finally, we evaluate a diverse range of open-source and commercial retrievers to serve as baseline systems. Quati is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/unicamp-dl/quati and all scripts at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/quati .

Sabiá-2: A New Generation of Portuguese Large Language Models

We introduce Sabi\'a-2, a family of large language models trained on Portuguese texts. The models are evaluated on a diverse range of exams, including entry-level tests for Brazilian universities, professional certification exams, and graduate-level exams for various disciplines such as accounting, economics, engineering, law and medicine. Our results reveal that our best model so far, Sabi\'a-2 Medium, matches or surpasses GPT-4's performance in 23 out of 64 exams and outperforms GPT-3.5 in 58 out of 64 exams. Notably, specialization has a significant impact on a model's performance without the need to increase its size, allowing us to offer Sabi\'a-2 Medium at a price per token that is 10 times cheaper than GPT-4. Finally, we identified that math and coding are key abilities that need improvement.

Juru: Legal Brazilian Large Language Model from Reputable Sources

The high computational cost associated with pretraining large language models limits their research. Two strategies have emerged to address this issue: domain specialization and pretraining with high-quality data. To explore these strategies, we specialized the Sabi\'a-2 Small model with 1.9 billion unique tokens from reputable Brazilian legal sources and conducted few-shot evaluations on legal and general knowledge exams. Our model, Juru, demonstrates the benefits of domain specialization with a reduced amount of pretraining data. However, this specialization comes at the expense of degrading performance in other knowledge areas within the same language. This study contributes to the growing body of scientific evidence showing that pretraining data selection may enhance the performance of large language models, enabling the exploration of these models at a lower cost.

Lissard: Long and Simple Sequential Reasoning Datasets

Language models are now capable of solving tasks that require dealing with long sequences consisting of hundreds of thousands of tokens. However, they often fail on tasks that require repetitive use of simple rules, even on sequences that are much shorter than those seen during training. For example, state-of-the-art LLMs can find common items in two lists with up to 20 items but fail when lists have 80 items. In this paper, we introduce Lissard, a benchmark comprising seven tasks whose goal is to assess the ability of models to process and generate wide-range sequence lengths, requiring repetitive procedural execution. Our evaluation of open-source (Mistral-7B and Mixtral-8x7B) and proprietary models (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) show a consistent decline in performance across all models as the complexity of the sequence increases. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/Lissard

ExaRanker-Open: Synthetic Explanation for IR using Open-Source LLMs

ExaRanker recently introduced an approach to training information retrieval (IR) models, incorporating natural language explanations as additional labels. The method addresses the challenge of limited labeled examples, leading to improvements in the effectiveness of IR models. However, the initial results were based on proprietary language models such as GPT-3.5, which posed constraints on dataset size due to its cost and data privacy. In this paper, we introduce ExaRanker-Open, where we adapt and explore the use of open-source language models to generate explanations. The method has been tested using different LLMs and datasets sizes to better comprehend the effective contribution of data augmentation. Our findings reveal that incorporating explanations consistently enhances neural rankers, with benefits escalating as the LLM size increases. Notably, the data augmentation method proves advantageous even with large datasets, as evidenced by ExaRanker surpassing the target baseline by 0.6 nDCG@10 points in our study. To encourage further advancements by the research community, we have open-sourced both the code and datasets at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/ExaRanker.

INACIA: Integrating Large Language Models in Brazilian Audit Courts: Opportunities and Challenges

This paper introduces INACIA (Instru\c{c}\~ao Assistida com Intelig\^encia Artificial), a groundbreaking system designed to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) into the operational framework of Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts (TCU). The system automates various stages of case analysis, including basic information extraction, admissibility examination, Periculum in mora and Fumus boni iuris analyses, and recommendations generation. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate INACIA's potential in extracting relevant information from case documents, evaluating its legal plausibility, and formulating propositions for judicial decision-making. Utilizing a validation dataset alongside LLMs, our evaluation methodology presents an innovative approach to assessing system performance, correlating highly with human judgment. The results highlight INACIA's proficiency in handling complex legal tasks, indicating its suitability for augmenting efficiency and judicial fairness within legal systems. The paper also discusses potential enhancements and future applications, positioning INACIA as a model for worldwide AI integration in legal domains.

InRanker: Distilled Rankers for Zero-shot Information Retrieval

Despite multi-billion parameter neural rankers being common components of state-of-the-art information retrieval pipelines, they are rarely used in production due to the enormous amount of compute required for inference. In this work, we propose a new method for distilling large rankers into their smaller versions focusing on out-of-domain effectiveness. We introduce InRanker, a version of monoT5 distilled from monoT5-3B with increased effectiveness on out-of-domain scenarios. Our key insight is to use language models and rerankers to generate as much as possible synthetic "in-domain" training data, i.e., data that closely resembles the data that will be seen at retrieval time. The pipeline consists of two distillation phases that do not require additional user queries or manual annotations: (1) training on existing supervised soft teacher labels, and (2) training on teacher soft labels for synthetic queries generated using a large language model. Consequently, models like monoT5-60M and monoT5-220M improved their effectiveness by using the teacher's knowledge, despite being 50x and 13x smaller, respectively. Models and code are available at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/InRanker.