Sketch-Guided Constrained Decoding for Boosting Blackbox Large Language Models without Logit Access

Constrained decoding, a technique for enforcing constraints on language model outputs, offers a way to control text generation without retraining or architectural modifications. Its application is, however, typically restricted to models that give users access to next-token distributions (usually via softmax logits), which poses a limitation with blackbox large language models (LLMs). This paper introduces sketch-guided constrained decoding (SGCD), a novel approach to constrained decoding for blackbox LLMs, which operates without access to the logits of the blackbox LLM. SGCD utilizes a locally hosted auxiliary model to refine the output of an unconstrained blackbox LLM, effectively treating this initial output as a "sketch" for further elaboration. This approach is complementary to traditional logit-based techniques and enables the application of constrained decoding in settings where full model transparency is unavailable. We demonstrate the efficacy of SGCD through experiments in closed information extraction and constituency parsing, showing how it enhances the utility and flexibility of blackbox LLMs for complex NLP tasks.

Flows: Building Blocks of Reasoning and Collaborating AI

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have produced highly capable and controllable systems. This creates unprecedented opportunities for structured reasoning as well as collaboration among multiple AI systems and humans. To fully realize this potential, it is essential to develop a principled way of designing and studying such structured interactions. For this purpose, we introduce the conceptual framework of Flows: a systematic approach to modeling complex interactions. Flows are self-contained building blocks of computation, with an isolated state, communicating through a standardized message-based interface. This modular design allows Flows to be recursively composed into arbitrarily nested interactions, with a substantial reduction of complexity. Crucially, any interaction can be implemented using this framework, including prior work on AI--AI and human--AI interactions, prompt engineering schemes, and tool augmentation. We demonstrate the potential of Flows on the task of competitive coding, a challenging task on which even GPT-4 struggles. Our results suggest that structured reasoning and collaboration substantially improve generalization, with AI-only Flows adding +$21$ and human--AI Flows adding +$54$ absolute points in terms of solve rate. To support rapid and rigorous research, we introduce the aiFlows library. The library comes with a repository of Flows that can be easily used, extended, and composed into novel, more complex Flows. The aiFlows library is available at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/aiflows. Data and Flows for reproducing our experiments are available at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/cc_flows.

Flexible Grammar-Based Constrained Decoding for Language Models

LLMs have shown impressive few-shot performance across many tasks. However, they still struggle when it comes to reliably generating complex output structures, such as those required for information extraction. This limitation stems from the fact that LLMs, without fine-tuning, tend to generate free text rather than structures precisely following a specific grammar. In this work, we propose to enrich the decoding with formal grammar constraints. More concretely, given Context-Free Grammar(CFG), our framework ensures that the token generated in each decoding step would lead to a valid continuation compliant with the grammar production rules. This process guarantees the generation of valid sequences. Importantly, our framework can be readily combined with any CFG or decoding algorithm. We demonstrate that the outputs of many NLP tasks can be represented as formal languages, making them suitable for direct use in our framework. We conducted experiments with two challenging tasks involving large alphabets in their grammar (Wikidata entities and relations): information extraction and entity disambiguation. Our results with LLaMA models indicate that grammar-constrained decoding substantially outperforms unconstrained decoding and even competes with task-specific fine-tuned models. These findings suggest that integrating grammar-based constraints during decoding holds great promise in making LLMs reliably produce structured outputs, especially in setting where training data is scarce and fine-tuning is expensive.

Legal Transformer Models May Not Always Help

Deep learning-based Natural Language Processing methods, especially transformers, have achieved impressive performance in the last few years. Applying those state-of-the-art NLP methods to legal activities to automate or simplify some simple work is of great value. This work investigates the value of domain adaptive pre-training and language adapters in legal NLP tasks. By comparing the performance of language models with domain adaptive pre-training on different tasks and different dataset splits, we show that domain adaptive pre-training is only helpful with low-resource downstream tasks, thus far from being a panacea. We also benchmark the performance of adapters in a typical legal NLP task and show that they can yield similar performance to full model tuning with much smaller training costs. As an additional result, we release LegalRoBERTa, a RoBERTa model further pre-trained on legal corpora.

An Enhanced MeanSum Method For Generating Hotel Multi-Review Summarizations

Multi-document summaritazion is the process of taking multiple texts as input and producing a short summary text based on the content of input texts. Up until recently, multi-document summarizers are mostly supervised extractive. However, supervised methods require datasets of large, paired document-summary examples which are rare and expensive to produce. In 2018, an unsupervised multi-document abstractive summarization method(Meansum) was proposed by Chu and Liu, and demonstrated competitive performances comparing to extractive methods. Despite good evaluation results on automatic metrics, Meansum has multiple limitations, notably the inability of dealing with multiple aspects. The aim of this work was to use Multi-Aspect Masker(MAM) as content selector to address the issue with multi-aspect. Moreover, we propose a regularizer to control the length of the generated summaries. Through a series of experiments on the hotel dataset from Trip Advisor, we validate our assumption and show that our improved model achieves higher ROUGE, Sentiment Accuracy than the original Meansum method and also beats/ comprarable/close to the supervised baseline.