Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong multilingual capabilities; yet, they are mostly English-centric due to the imbalanced training corpora. Existing works leverage this phenomenon to improve their multilingual performances on NLP tasks. In this work, we extend the evaluation from NLP tasks to real user queries. We find that even though translation into English can help improve the performance of multilingual NLP tasks for English-centric LLMs, it may not be optimal for all scenarios. For culture-related tasks that need deep language understanding, prompting in the native language proves to be more promising since it can capture the nuances related to culture and language. Therefore, we advocate for more efforts towards the development of strong multilingual LLMs instead of just English-centric LLMs.
As an effective alternative to the direct fine-tuning on target tasks in specific languages, cross-lingual transfer addresses the challenges of limited training data by decoupling ''task ability'' and ''language ability'' by fine-tuning on the target task in the source language and another selected task in the target language, respectively. However, they fail to fully separate the task ability from the source language or the language ability from the chosen task. In this paper, we acknowledge the mutual reliance between task ability and language ability and direct our attention toward the gap between the target language and the source language on tasks. As the gap removes the impact of tasks, we assume that it remains consistent across tasks. Based on this assumption, we propose a new cross-lingual transfer method called $\texttt{AdaMergeX}$ that utilizes adaptive adapter merging. By introducing a reference task, we can determine that the divergence of adapters fine-tuned on the reference task in both languages follows the same distribution as the divergence of adapters fine-tuned on the target task in both languages. Hence, we can obtain target adapters by combining the other three adapters. Furthermore, we propose a structure-adaptive adapter merging method. Our empirical results demonstrate that our approach yields new and effective cross-lingual transfer, outperforming existing methods across all settings.
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across a spectrum of languages. In this work, we delve into the question: How do LLMs handle multilingualism? We introduce a framework that depicts LLMs' processing of multilingual inputs: In the first several layers, LLMs understand the question, converting multilingual inputs into English to facilitate the task-solving phase. In the intermediate layers, LLMs engage in problem-solving by thinking in English and incorporating multilingual knowledge to obtain factual content, leveraging the self-attention and feed-forward structures, respectively. In the last several layers, LLMs generate responses that align with the original language of the query. In addition, we investigate the existence of language-specific neurons when processing a certain language. To detect neurons activated by the input language, even without labels, we innovatively design a Parallel Language specific Neuron Detection ($\texttt{PLND}$) method that effectively measures the significance of neurons when handling multilingual inputs. By comprehensive ablation analysis through deactivating neurons of different layers and structures, we verify the framework that we propose. Additionally, we demonstrate that we can utilize such a framework to effectively enhance the multilingual ability with much less training effort.
Web agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in planning and executing multi-step interactions within complex web-based environments, fulfilling a wide range of web navigation tasks. Despite these advancements, the potential for LLM-powered agents to effectively engage with sequential user instructions in real-world scenarios has not been fully explored. In this work, we introduce a new task of Conversational Web Navigation, which necessitates sophisticated interactions that span multiple turns with both the users and the environment, supported by a specially developed dataset named Multi-Turn Mind2Web (MT-Mind2Web). To tackle the limited context length of LLMs and the context-dependency issue of the conversational tasks, we further propose a novel framework, named self-reflective memory-augmented planning (Self-MAP), which employs memory utilization and self-reflection techniques. Extensive experiments are conducted to benchmark the MT-Mind2Web dataset, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
In the fast-paced field of human-computer interaction (HCI) and virtual reality (VR), automatic gesture recognition has become increasingly essential. This is particularly true for the recognition of hand signs, providing an intuitive way to effortlessly navigate and control VR and HCI applications. Considering increased privacy requirements, radar sensors emerge as a compelling alternative to cameras. They operate effectively in low-light conditions without capturing identifiable human details, thanks to their lower resolution and distinct wavelength compared to visible light. While previous works predominantly deploy radar sensors for dynamic hand gesture recognition based on Doppler information, our approach prioritizes classification using an imaging radar that operates on spatial information, e.g. image-like data. However, generating large training datasets required for neural networks (NN) is a time-consuming and challenging process, often falling short of covering all potential scenarios. Acknowledging these challenges, this study explores the efficacy of synthetic data generated by an advanced radar ray-tracing simulator. This simulator employs an intuitive material model that can be adjusted to introduce data diversity. Despite exclusively training the NN on synthetic data, it demonstrates promising performance when put to the test with real measurement data. This emphasizes the practicality of our methodology in overcoming data scarcity challenges and advancing the field of automatic gesture recognition in VR and HCI applications.
Online continual learning, the process of training models on streaming data, has gained increasing attention in recent years. However, a critical aspect often overlooked is the label delay, where new data may not be labeled due to slow and costly annotation processes. We introduce a new continual learning framework with explicit modeling of the label delay between data and label streams over time steps. In each step, the framework reveals both unlabeled data from the current time step $t$ and labels delayed with $d$ steps, from the time step $t-d$. In our extensive experiments amounting to 1060 GPU days, we show that merely augmenting the computational resources is insufficient to tackle this challenge. Our findings underline a notable performance decline when solely relying on labeled data when the label delay becomes significant. More surprisingly, when using state-of-the-art SSL and TTA techniques to utilize the newer, unlabeled data, they fail to surpass the performance of a na\"ive method that simply trains on the delayed supervised stream. To this end, we introduce a simple, efficient baseline that rehearses from the labeled memory samples that are most similar to the new unlabeled samples. This method bridges the accuracy gap caused by label delay without significantly increasing computational complexity. We show experimentally that our method is the least affected by the label delay factor and in some cases successfully recovers the accuracy of the non-delayed counterpart. We conduct various ablations and sensitivity experiments, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
Despite the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, there remains a linguistic bias that favors high-resource languages, such as English, often at the expense of low-resource and regional languages. To address this imbalance, we introduce SeaLLMs, an innovative series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. SeaLLMs are built upon the Llama-2 model and further advanced through continued pre-training with an extended vocabulary, specialized instruction and alignment tuning to better capture the intricacies of regional languages. This allows them to respect and reflect local cultural norms, customs, stylistic preferences, and legal considerations. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that SeaLLM-13b models exhibit superior performance across a wide spectrum of linguistic tasks and assistant-style instruction-following capabilities relative to comparable open-source models. Moreover, they outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages, such as Thai, Khmer, Lao, and Burmese, by large margins while remaining lightweight and cost-effective to operate.
Generative large language models(LLMs) are proficient in solving general problems but often struggle to handle domain-specific tasks. This is because most of domain-specific tasks, such as personalized recommendation, rely on task-related information for optimal performance. Current methods attempt to supplement task-related information to LLMs by designing appropriate prompts or employing supervised fine-tuning techniques. Nevertheless, these methods encounter the certain issue that information such as community behavior pattern in RS domain is challenging to express in natural language, which limits the capability of LLMs to surpass state-of-the-art domain-specific models. On the other hand, domain-specific models for personalized recommendation which mainly rely on user interactions are susceptible to data sparsity due to their limited common knowledge capabilities. To address these issues, we proposes a method to bridge the information gap between the domain-specific models and the general large language models. Specifically, we propose an information sharing module which serves as an information storage mechanism and also acts as a bridge for collaborative training between the LLMs and domain-specific models. By doing so, we can improve the performance of LLM-based recommendation with the help of user behavior pattern information mined by domain-specific models. On the other hand, the recommendation performance of domain-specific models can also be improved with the help of common knowledge learned by LLMs. Experimental results on three real-world datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Proactive dialogues serve as a practical yet challenging dialogue problem in the era of large language models (LLMs), where the dialogue policy planning is the key to improving the proactivity of LLMs. Most existing studies enable the dialogue policy planning of LLMs using various prompting schemes or iteratively enhance this capability in handling the given case with verbal AI feedback. However, these approaches are either bounded by the policy planning capability of the frozen LLMs or hard to be transferred to new cases. In this work, we introduce a new dialogue policy planning paradigm to strategize LLMs for proactive dialogue problems with a tunable language model plug-in as a plug-and-play dialogue policy planner, named PPDPP. Specifically, we develop a novel training framework to facilitate supervised fine-tuning over available human-annotated data as well as reinforcement learning from goal-oriented AI feedback with dynamic interaction data collected by the LLM-based self-play simulation. In this manner, the LLM-powered dialogue agent can not only be generalized to different cases after the training, but also be applicable to different applications by just substituting the learned plug-in. In addition, we propose to evaluate the policy planning capability of dialogue systems under the interactive setting. Experimental results demonstrate that PPDPP consistently and substantially outperforms existing approaches on three different proactive dialogue applications, including negotiation, emotional support, and tutoring dialogues.
Sentiment analysis is a well-established natural language processing task, with sentiment polarity classification being one of its most popular and representative tasks. However, despite the success of pre-trained language models in this area, they often fall short of capturing the broader complexities of sentiment analysis. To address this issue, we propose a new task called Sentiment and Opinion Understanding of Language (SOUL). SOUL aims to evaluate sentiment understanding through two subtasks: Review Comprehension (RC) and Justification Generation (JG). RC seeks to validate statements that focus on subjective information based on a review text, while JG requires models to provide explanations for their sentiment predictions. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we annotate a new dataset comprising 15,028 statements from 3,638 reviews. Experimental results indicate that SOUL is a challenging task for both small and large language models, with a performance gap of up to 27% when compared to human performance. Furthermore, evaluations conducted with both human experts and GPT-4 highlight the limitations of the small language model in generating reasoning-based justifications. These findings underscore the challenging nature of the SOUL task for existing models, emphasizing the need for further advancements in sentiment analysis to address its complexities. The new dataset and code are available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/SOUL.