SELF: Language-Driven Self-Evolution for Large Language Model

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable versatility across diverse domains. However, the pathway toward autonomous model development, a cornerstone for achieving human-level learning and advancing autonomous AI, remains largely uncharted. We introduce an innovative approach, termed "SELF" (Self-Evolution with Language Feedback). This methodology empowers LLMs to undergo continual self-evolution. Furthermore, SELF employs language-based feedback as a versatile and comprehensive evaluative tool, pinpointing areas for response refinement and bolstering the stability of self-evolutionary training. Initiating with meta-skill learning, SELF acquires foundational meta-skills with a focus on self-feedback and self-refinement. These meta-skills are critical, guiding the model's subsequent self-evolution through a cycle of perpetual training with self-curated data, thereby enhancing its intrinsic abilities. Given unlabeled instructions, SELF equips the model with the capability to autonomously generate and interactively refine responses. This synthesized training data is subsequently filtered and utilized for iterative fine-tuning, enhancing the model's capabilities. Experimental results on representative benchmarks substantiate that SELF can progressively advance its inherent abilities without the requirement of human intervention, thereby indicating a viable pathway for autonomous model evolution. Additionally, SELF can employ online self-refinement strategy to produce responses of superior quality. In essence, the SELF framework signifies a progressive step towards autonomous LLM development, transforming the LLM from a mere passive recipient of information into an active participant in its own evolution.

Adaptive-Solver Framework for Dynamic Strategy Selection in Large Language Model Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are showcasing impressive ability in handling complex reasoning tasks. In real-world situations, problems often span a spectrum of complexities. Humans inherently adjust their problem-solving approaches based on task complexity. However, most methodologies that leverage LLMs tend to adopt a uniform approach: utilizing consistent models, prompting methods, and degrees of problem decomposition, regardless of the problem complexity. Inflexibility of them can bring unnecessary computational overhead or sub-optimal performance. To address this problem, we introduce an Adaptive-Solver framework. It strategically modulates solving strategies based on the difficulties of the problems. Given an initial solution, the framework functions with two primary modules. The initial evaluation module assesses the adequacy of the current solution. If improvements are needed, the subsequent adaptation module comes into play. Within this module, three key adaptation strategies are employed: (1) Model Adaptation: Switching to a stronger LLM when a weaker variant is inadequate. (2) Prompting Method Adaptation: Alternating between different prompting techniques to suit the problem's nuances. (3) Decomposition Granularity Adaptation: Breaking down a complex problem into more fine-grained sub-questions to enhance solvability. Through such dynamic adaptations, our framework not only enhances computational efficiency but also elevates the overall performance. This dual-benefit ensures both the efficiency of the system for simpler tasks and the precision required for more complex questions. Experimental results from complex reasoning tasks reveal that the prompting method adaptation and decomposition granularity adaptation enhance performance across all tasks. Furthermore, the model adaptation approach significantly reduces API costs (up to 50%) while maintaining superior performance.

Exploring Self-Reinforcement for Improving Learnersourced Multiple-Choice Question Explanations with Large Language Models

Learnersourcing involves students generating and sharing learning resources with their peers. When learnersourcing multiple-choice questions, creating explanations for the generated questions is a crucial step as it facilitates a deeper understanding of the related concepts. However, it is often difficult for students to craft effective explanations due to limited subject understanding and a tendency to merely restate the question stem, distractors, and correct answer. To help scaffold this task, in this work we propose a self-reinforcement large-language-model framework, with the goal of generating and evaluating explanations automatically. Comprising three modules, the framework generates student-aligned explanations, evaluates these explanations to ensure their quality and iteratively enhances the explanations. If an explanation's evaluation score falls below a defined threshold, the framework iteratively refines and reassesses the explanation. Importantly, our framework emulates the manner in which students compose explanations at the relevant grade level. For evaluation, we had a human subject-matter expert compare the explanations generated by students with the explanations created by the open-source large language model Vicuna-13B, a version of Vicuna-13B that had been fine-tuned using our method, and by GPT-4. We observed that, when compared to other large language models, GPT-4 exhibited a higher level of creativity in generating explanations. We also found that explanations generated by GPT-4 were ranked higher by the human expert than both those created by the other models and the original student-created explanations. Our findings represent a significant advancement in enriching the learnersourcing experience for students and enhancing the capabilities of large language models in educational applications.

Aligning Large Language Models with Human: A Survey

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on extensive textual corpora have emerged as leading solutions for a broad array of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Despite their notable performance, these models are prone to certain limitations such as misunderstanding human instructions, generating potentially biased content, or factually incorrect (hallucinated) information. Hence, aligning LLMs with human expectations has become an active area of interest within the research community. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of these alignment technologies, including the following aspects. (1) Data collection: the methods for effectively collecting high-quality instructions for LLM alignment, including the use of NLP benchmarks, human annotations, and leveraging strong LLMs. (2) Training methodologies: a detailed review of the prevailing training methods employed for LLM alignment. Our exploration encompasses Supervised Fine-tuning, both Online and Offline human preference training, along with parameter-efficient training mechanisms. (3) Model Evaluation: the methods for evaluating the effectiveness of these human-aligned LLMs, presenting a multifaceted approach towards their assessment. In conclusion, we collate and distill our findings, shedding light on several promising future research avenues in the field. This survey, therefore, serves as a valuable resource for anyone invested in understanding and advancing the alignment of LLMs to better suit human-oriented tasks and expectations. An associated GitHub link collecting the latest papers is available at https://github.com/GaryYufei/AlignLLMHumanSurvey.

GroundNLQ @ Ego4D Natural Language Queries Challenge 2023

In this report, we present our champion solution for Ego4D Natural Language Queries (NLQ) Challenge in CVPR 2023. Essentially, to accurately ground in a video, an effective egocentric feature extractor and a powerful grounding model are required. Motivated by this, we leverage a two-stage pre-training strategy to train egocentric feature extractors and the grounding model on video narrations, and further fine-tune the model on annotated data. In addition, we introduce a novel grounding model GroundNLQ, which employs a multi-modal multi-scale grounding module for effective video and text fusion and various temporal intervals, especially for long videos. On the blind test set, GroundNLQ achieves 25.67 and 18.18 for R1@IoU=0.3 and R1@IoU=0.5, respectively, and surpasses all other teams by a noticeable margin. Our code will be released at\url{https://github.com/houzhijian/GroundNLQ}.

Contrastive Learning with Logic-driven Data Augmentation for Logical Reasoning over Text

Pre-trained large language model (LLM) is under exploration to perform NLP tasks that may require logical reasoning. Logic-driven data augmentation for representation learning has been shown to improve the performance of tasks requiring logical reasoning, but most of these data rely on designed templates and therefore lack generalization. In this regard, we propose an AMR-based logical equivalence-driven data augmentation method (AMR-LE) for generating logically equivalent data. Specifically, we first parse a text into the form of an AMR graph, next apply four logical equivalence laws (contraposition, double negation, commutative and implication laws) on the AMR graph to construct a logically equivalent/inequivalent AMR graph, and then convert it into a logically equivalent/inequivalent sentence. To help the model to better learn these logical equivalence laws, we propose a logical equivalence-driven contrastive learning training paradigm, which aims to distinguish the difference between logical equivalence and inequivalence. Our AMR-LE (Ensemble) achieves #2 on the ReClor leaderboard https://eval.ai/web/challenges/challenge-page/503/leaderboard/1347 . Our model shows better performance on seven downstream tasks, including ReClor, LogiQA, MNLI, MRPC, RTE, QNLI, and QQP. The source code and dataset are public at https://github.com/Strong-AI-Lab/Logical-Equivalence-driven-AMR-Data-Augmentation-for-Representation-Learning .

MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory

Revolutionary advancements in Large Language Models have drastically reshaped our interactions with artificial intelligence systems. Despite this, a notable hindrance remains-the deficiency of a long-term memory mechanism within these models. This shortfall becomes increasingly evident in situations demanding sustained interaction, such as personal companion systems and psychological counseling. Therefore, we propose MemoryBank, a novel memory mechanism tailored for LLMs. MemoryBank enables the models to summon relevant memories, continually evolve through continuous memory updates, comprehend, and adapt to a user personality by synthesizing information from past interactions. To mimic anthropomorphic behaviors and selectively preserve memory, MemoryBank incorporates a memory updating mechanism, inspired by the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve theory, which permits the AI to forget and reinforce memory based on time elapsed and the relative significance of the memory, thereby offering a human-like memory mechanism. MemoryBank is versatile in accommodating both closed-source models like ChatGPT and open-source models like ChatGLM. We exemplify application of MemoryBank through the creation of an LLM-based chatbot named SiliconFriend in a long-term AI Companion scenario. Further tuned with psychological dialogs, SiliconFriend displays heightened empathy in its interactions. Experiment involves both qualitative analysis with real-world user dialogs and quantitative analysis with simulated dialogs. In the latter, ChatGPT acts as users with diverse characteristics and generates long-term dialog contexts covering a wide array of topics. The results of our analysis reveal that SiliconFriend, equipped with MemoryBank, exhibits a strong capability for long-term companionship as it can provide emphatic response, recall relevant memories and understand user personality.

AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models

Evaluating the general abilities of foundation models to tackle human-level tasks is a vital aspect of their development and application in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Traditional benchmarks, which rely on artificial datasets, may not accurately represent human-level capabilities. In this paper, we introduce AGIEval, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess foundation model in the context of human-centric standardized exams, such as college entrance exams, law school admission tests, math competitions, and lawyer qualification tests. We evaluate several state-of-the-art foundation models, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and Text-Davinci-003, using this benchmark. Impressively, GPT-4 surpasses average human performance on SAT, LSAT, and math competitions, attaining a 95% accuracy rate on the SAT Math test and a 92.5% accuracy on the English test of the Chinese national college entrance exam. This demonstrates the extraordinary performance of contemporary foundation models. In contrast, we also find that GPT-4 is less proficient in tasks that require complex reasoning or specific domain knowledge. Our comprehensive analyses of model capabilities (understanding, knowledge, reasoning, and calculation) reveal these models' strengths and limitations, providing valuable insights into future directions for enhancing their general capabilities. By concentrating on tasks pertinent to human cognition and decision-making, our benchmark delivers a more meaningful and robust evaluation of foundation models' performance in real-world scenarios. The data, code, and all model outputs are released in https://github.com/microsoft/AGIEval.

An Efficient COarse-to-fiNE Alignment Framework @ Ego4D Natural Language Queries Challenge 2022

This technical report describes the CONE approach for Ego4D Natural Language Queries (NLQ) Challenge in ECCV 2022. We leverage our model CONE, an efficient window-centric COarse-to-fiNE alignment framework. Specifically, CONE dynamically slices the long video into candidate windows via a sliding window approach. Centering at windows, CONE (1) learns the inter-window (coarse-grained) semantic variance through contrastive learning and speeds up inference by pre-filtering the candidate windows relevant to the NL query, and (2) conducts intra-window (fine-grained) candidate moments ranking utilizing the powerful multi-modal alignment ability of the contrastive vision-text pre-trained model EgoVLP. On the blind test set, CONE achieves 15.26 and 9.24 for R1@IoU=0.3 and R1@IoU=0.5, respectively.

Disentangling Reasoning Capabilities from Language Models with Compositional Reasoning Transformers

This paper presents ReasonFormer, a unified reasoning framework for mirroring the modular and compositional reasoning process of humans in complex decision making. Inspired by dual-process theory in cognitive science, the representation module (automatic thinking) and reasoning modules (controlled thinking) are disentangled to capture different levels of cognition. Upon the top of the representation module, the pre-trained reasoning modules are modular and expertise in specific and fundamental reasoning skills (e.g., logic, simple QA, etc). To mimic the controlled compositional thinking process, different reasoning modules are dynamically activated and composed in both parallel and cascaded manners to control what reasoning skills are activated and how deep the reasoning process will be reached to solve the current problems. The unified reasoning framework solves multiple tasks with a single model,and is trained and inferred in an end-to-end manner. Evaluated on 11 datasets requiring different reasoning skills and complexity, ReasonFormer demonstrates substantial performance boosts, revealing the compositional reasoning ability. Few-shot experiments exhibit better generalization ability by learning to compose pre-trained skills for new tasks with limited data,and decoupling the representation module and the reasoning modules. Further analysis shows the modularity of reasoning modules as different tasks activate distinct reasoning skills at different reasoning depths.