COIG-CQIA: Quality is All You Need for Chinese Instruction Fine-tuning

Recently, there have been significant advancements in large language models (LLMs), particularly focused on the English language. These advancements have enabled these LLMs to understand and execute complex instructions with unprecedented accuracy and fluency. However, despite these advancements, there remains a noticeable gap in the development of Chinese instruction tuning. The unique linguistic features and cultural depth of the Chinese language pose challenges for instruction tuning tasks. Existing datasets are either derived from English-centric LLMs or are ill-suited for aligning with the interaction patterns of real-world Chinese users. To bridge this gap, we introduce COIG-CQIA, a high-quality Chinese instruction tuning dataset. Our aim is to build a diverse, wide-ranging instruction-tuning dataset to better align model behavior with human interactions. To this end, we collect a high-quality human-written corpus from various sources on the Chinese Internet, including Q&A communities, Wikis, examinations, and existing NLP datasets. This corpus was rigorously filtered and carefully processed to form the COIG-CQIA dataset. Furthermore, we train models of various scales on different subsets of CQIA, following in-depth evaluation and analyses. The findings from our experiments offer valuable insights for selecting and developing Chinese instruction-tuning datasets. We also find that models trained on CQIA-Subset achieve competitive results in human assessment as well as knowledge and security benchmarks. Data are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/m-a-p/COIG-CQIA

MoZIP: A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Large Language Models in Intellectual Property

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, there is limited understanding of how well LLMs perform in specific domains (e.g, the intellectual property (IP) domain). In this paper, we contribute a new benchmark, the first Multilingual-oriented quiZ on Intellectual Property (MoZIP), for the evaluation of LLMs in the IP domain. The MoZIP benchmark includes three challenging tasks: IP multiple-choice quiz (IPQuiz), IP question answering (IPQA), and patent matching (PatentMatch). In addition, we also develop a new IP-oriented multilingual large language model (called MoZi), which is a BLOOMZ-based model that has been supervised fine-tuned with multilingual IP-related text data. We evaluate our proposed MoZi model and four well-known LLMs (i.e., BLOOMZ, BELLE, ChatGLM and ChatGPT) on the MoZIP benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that MoZi outperforms BLOOMZ, BELLE and ChatGLM by a noticeable margin, while it had lower scores compared with ChatGPT. Notably, the performance of current LLMs on the MoZIP benchmark has much room for improvement, and even the most powerful ChatGPT does not reach the passing level. Our source code, data, and models are available at \url{https://github.com/AI-for-Science/MoZi}.

Layer-wise Regularized Dropout for Neural Language Models

Among the various pre-trained neural language models that are popular today, dropout is already an indispensable regularization technique. To solve the inconsistency between training and inference caused by the randomness of dropout, some studies use consistency training to regularize dropout at the output layer. In this paper, we propose a novel Layer-wise Regularized Dropout (LR-Drop), which is specially designed for Transformer-based Language models. Specifically, LR-Drop layer-wise regularizes each Transformer layer using the consistency training strategy. Each training sample passes through the two siamese sub-models sampled by dropout, and then LR-Drop forces the hidden states, multi-head attention matrices, and output distribution of the two siamese sub-models to be consistent. The proposed LR-Drop can be regarded as a "self-distillation" framework, in which each sub-model generated by dropout is the other's "teacher" model and "student" model. Through extensive experiments on 8 natural language understanding datasets, 6 neural machine translation datasets, and 1 abstractive summarization dataset (a total of 15 datasets), we show that LR-Drop achieves superior performances, including state-of-the-art results.

History, Development, and Principles of Large Language Models-An Introductory Survey

Language models serve as a cornerstone in natural language processing (NLP), utilizing mathematical methods to generalize language laws and knowledge for prediction and generation. Over extensive research spanning decades, language modeling has progressed from initial statistical language models (SLMs) to the contemporary landscape of large language models (LLMs). Notably, the swift evolution of LLMs has reached the ability to process, understand, and generate human-level text. Nevertheless, despite the significant advantages that LLMs offer in improving both work and personal lives, the limited understanding among general practitioners about the background and principles of these models hampers their full potential. Notably, most LLMs reviews focus on specific aspects and utilize specialized language, posing a challenge for practitioners lacking relevant background knowledge. In light of this, this survey aims to present a comprehensible overview of LLMs to assist a broader audience. It strives to facilitate a comprehensive understanding by exploring the historical background of language models and tracing their evolution over time. The survey further investigates the factors influencing the development of LLMs, emphasizing key contributions. Additionally, it concentrates on elucidating the underlying principles of LLMs, equipping audiences with essential theoretical knowledge. The survey also highlights the limitations of existing work and points out promising future directions.

E-EVAL: A Comprehensive Chinese K-12 Education Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

With the accelerating development of Large Language Models (LLMs), many LLMs are beginning to be used in the Chinese K-12 education domain. The integration of LLMs and education is getting closer and closer, however, there is currently no benchmark for evaluating LLMs that focuses on the Chinese K-12 education domain. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive natural language processing benchmark to accurately assess the capabilities of various LLMs in the Chinese K-12 education domain. To address this, we introduce the E-EVAL, the first comprehensive evaluation benchmark specifically designed for the Chinese K-12 education field. The E-EVAL consists of 4,351 multiple-choice questions at the primary, middle, and high school levels across a wide range of subjects, including Chinese, English, Politics, History, Ethics, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Geography. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of E-EVAL on advanced LLMs, including both English-dominant and Chinese-dominant models. Findings show that Chinese-dominant models perform well compared to English-dominant models, with many scoring even above the GPT 4.0. However, almost all models perform poorly in complex subjects such as mathematics. We also found that most Chinese-dominant LLMs did not achieve higher scores at the primary school level compared to the middle school level. We observe that the mastery of higher-order knowledge by the model does not necessarily imply the mastery of lower-order knowledge as well. Additionally, the experimental results indicate that the Chain of Thought (CoT) technique is effective only for the challenging science subjects, while Few-shot prompting is more beneficial for liberal arts subjects. With E-EVAL, we aim to analyze the strengths and limitations of LLMs in educational applications, and to contribute to the progress and development of Chinese K-12 education and LLMs.

Forgetting before Learning: Utilizing Parametric Arithmetic for Knowledge Updating in Large Language Models

Recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their amazing text understanding and generation capabilities. However, even stronger LLMs may still learn incorrect knowledge from the training corpus, as well as some knowledge that is outdated over time. Direct secondary fine-tuning with data containing new knowledge may be ineffective in updating knowledge due to the conflict between old and new knowledge. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for fine-tuning called F-Learning (Forgetting before Learning), which is based on parametric arithmetic to achieve forgetting of old knowledge and learning of new knowledge. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed F-Learning can obviously improve the knowledge updating performance of both full fine-tuning and LoRA fine-tuning. Moreover, we have also discovered that forgetting old knowledge by subtracting the parameters of LoRA can achieve a similar effect to subtracting the parameters of full fine-tuning, and sometimes even surpass it significantly.

ELECTRA is a Zero-Shot Learner, Too

Recently, for few-shot or even zero-shot learning, the new paradigm "pre-train, prompt, and predict" has achieved remarkable achievements compared with the "pre-train, fine-tune" paradigm. After the success of prompt-based GPT-3, a series of masked language model (MLM)-based (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa) prompt learning methods became popular and widely used. However, another efficient pre-trained discriminative model, ELECTRA, has probably been neglected. In this paper, we attempt to accomplish several NLP tasks in the zero-shot scenario using a novel our proposed replaced token detection (RTD)-based prompt learning method. Experimental results show that ELECTRA model based on RTD-prompt learning achieves surprisingly state-of-the-art zero-shot performance. Numerically, compared to MLM-RoBERTa-large and MLM-BERT-large, our RTD-ELECTRA-large has an average of about 8.4% and 13.7% improvement on all 15 tasks. Especially on the SST-2 task, our RTD-ELECTRA-large achieves an astonishing 90.1% accuracy without any training data. Overall, compared to the pre-trained masked language models, the pre-trained replaced token detection model performs better in zero-shot learning. The source code is available at: https://github.com/nishiwen1214/RTD-ELECTRA.

True or False: Does the Deep Learning Model Learn to Detect Rumors?

It is difficult for humans to distinguish the true and false of rumors, but current deep learning models can surpass humans and achieve excellent accuracy on many rumor datasets. In this paper, we investigate whether deep learning models that seem to perform well actually learn to detect rumors. We evaluate models on their generalization ability to out-of-domain examples by fine-tuning BERT-based models on five real-world datasets and evaluating against all test sets. The experimental results indicate that the generalization ability of the models on other unseen datasets are unsatisfactory, even common-sense rumors cannot be detected. Moreover, we found through experiments that models take shortcuts and learn absurd knowledge when the rumor datasets have serious data pitfalls. This means that simple modifications to the rumor text based on specific rules will lead to inconsistent model predictions. To more realistically evaluate rumor detection models, we proposed a new evaluation method called paired test (PairT), which requires models to correctly predict a pair of test samples at the same time. Furthermore, we make recommendations on how to better create rumor dataset and evaluate rumor detection model at the end of this paper.

DropAttack: A Masked Weight Adversarial Training Method to Improve Generalization of Neural Networks

Adversarial training has been proven to be a powerful regularization method to improve the generalization of models. However, current adversarial training methods only attack the original input sample or the embedding vectors, and their attacks lack coverage and diversity. To further enhance the breadth and depth of attack, we propose a novel masked weight adversarial training method called DropAttack, which enhances generalization of model by adding intentionally worst-case adversarial perturbations to both the input and hidden layers in different dimensions and minimize the adversarial risks generated by each layer. DropAttack is a general technique and can be adopt to a wide variety of neural networks with different architectures. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we used five public datasets in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) for experimental evaluating. We compare the proposed method with other adversarial training methods and regularization methods, and our method achieves state-of-the-art on all datasets. In addition, Dropattack can achieve the same performance when it use only a half training data compared to other standard training method. Theoretical analysis reveals that DropAttack can perform gradient regularization at random on some of the input and wight parameters of the model. Further visualization experiments show that DropAttack can push the minimum risk of the model to a lower and flatter loss landscapes. Our source code is publicly available on https://github.com/nishiwen1214/DropAttack.